How to Do More with Less

2What Exactly Is AI?

I was captivated by AI movies as a child. They felt like an accelerated preview of the future, delivered in 90 minutes. While some plots drifted into the narrative extremes of science fiction, others carried a chilling realism. For decades, since the concept of truly intelligent AI felt distant, we primarily encountered it through the lens of Hollywood.

Hollywood hasn't just entertained us; it has been actively shaping the global understanding of AI. By casting intelligent machines in roles that range from coldly logical to overtly homicidal, the industry established an almost default public lens: the “kill-all-humans” scenario. This fictional framing has tangible real-world effects. Surveys frequently show spikes in public AI anxiety following the release of a major franchise, influencing everything from the allocation of funding for “AI safety” research to the cautionary op-eds filling our major newspapers.

Films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its calm, murderous HAL 9000, and The Terminator, which gifted us the chilling shorthand of the “Skynet scenario,” cemented the rogue super-AI trope. This trope now frames high-stakes policy debates about alignment and control problems, even being cited in congressional hearings. Early on, as far back as Metropolis in 1927, cinema established the link between automation and worker anxiety, a fear still echoing in today’s headlines about “robots taking our jobs.”

Beyond the fear of annihilation, another powerful ...