Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Is The Perfect AI Panic Movie

American action movie villains have always served as a kind of litmus test for paranoia, capturing the particular fears facing the country and its citizens at any given moment. During the Cold War, films such as From Russia With Love , Rocky IV , and Red Dawn all responded to public fears of rogue Soviets supposedly destroying the capitalist way of life. In the 1990s and 2000s, films featuring the long-forgotten "Red Menace" relied on the ugly "evil Arab" motif and drew their villains from the Middle East. Other recent developments have turned them into rogue spies, clandestine cyber terrorists, and self-serving arms dealers common in the information landscape.

But for this week 's Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One , screenwriters Eric Jendresen and Christopher McQuarrie (who also directed the film) created their final evil, known as The Entity, from a more amorphous fear: a swarm — a powerful, sentient being. Animals, Visual AI. Through an online network, he has access to everything and can harness those evil technological powers, from global military superpowers to a granny with a gun. He is everywhere and nowhere at the same time, and although the film uses Gabriel as the entity's henchman by Esai Morales, he is a mere mortal despite having access to all the information and decision-making logic possessed by the world's most powerful supercomputer. Offer

While the term "man vs. machine" isn't new, the idea that sentient AI will triumph over humanity seems especially clear in 2023, when ChatGPT will do the term paper and corporations will hire science-based bots. Technical support from Quotation. The threat of AI-generated content poses a major risk to striking members of the Writers Guild of America, and many want to ensure that the new contract they sign includes provisions that allow studios to own the technology used to create screenplays.

Of course, Dead Reckoning was written years ago. The release of the first part was scheduled for summer 2021 before Covid-19 thwarted the film's production schedule. Macquarie and co. The film's current release date is right on track. Congress. Control the AI. Fears of an inevitable AI takeover are high right now, even if (or if) most Americans don't know how it might happen.

Perhaps that's why The Entity works as a villain, even if the way the film portrays him with crooked graphics and eye-like visuals is a bit goofy. Most viewers have had a brief encounter with AI, perhaps through a few minutes of researching ChatGPT or a series of conversations at a backyard barbecue about how the Bing chatbot screwed up and encouraged a New York Times reporter to leave his wife. There are gaps and technological advances in how the gist works - and a simple kill switch on a submerged submarine buried under ice - but none of that matters if you don't do it. You are just an idiot looking for something new and mysterious. fear

Additionally, AI is a relatively harmless enemy. At a time when action movies cannot create villains from a different nationality, ethnic group or political organization, a smart and especially evil computer would probably anger the most ardent supporters of AI, and a significant proportion of them already support it. Technology may lead to human extinction. Dead Reckoning: Part One needs to be a worldwide box office hit to recoup its $290 million budget, and having a faceless enemy to spit on for almost the entire world is definitely a step in the right direction.

Perhaps Mission: Impossible's Entity is a harbinger of the future for action movie villains. Heart of Stone and The Creator will feature AI enemies ready to destroy the world in August and September respectively. Mankind will undoubtedly win and survive both here and in Dead Reckoning — action movies are mind games, after all — but in the meantime, millions of moviegoers can rally in fear of what's to come.

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