‘Ghost in the Machine’ Asks ‘What is AI?’ - Shepherd Express

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Ghost in the Machine (2026) - Documentary

In 2016 Microsoft introduced a Chatbot called Tay, an anime Millennial capable of conversing with the bored and the lovelorn. What did Tay have to say? She denied the Holocaust, admired Hitler and declared that feminists “should all die and burn in hell.” Those were simpler times when such breaches of decorum were roundly condemned. Ten years later, the world is submerged in antisocial, computer-abetted slop, including steady gushers from the highest office in our land.

How was Tay programmed to “think” as she did?

The new documentary Ghost in the Machine takes a hard look at where it all came from and where it might be heading. Writer-director Valerie Veatch composed her analysis from a fast-moving stream of archival images and talking heads. You’ll want to hit pause often if watching at home to consider the implications. In a theater, you may want to take notes in shorthand.

To begin, the definition of Artificial Intelligence is nearly broad enough to mean whatever someone says it means. The term surfaced in the early ‘70s, especially via John McCarthy, a Marxist-turned-hard-right computer scientist—a materialist who thought human society can be engineered, the world reduced to a math problem. For him, technology was the revolution. He saw Artificial Intelligence as a useful phrase for attracting funding, especially from the military, whose endless reservoir of tax dollars has been more crucial than some libertarian tech bros care to admit. AI, the film’s many interviewees agree, is less a coherent technology than a catch-all for loosely related yet varying systems. A marketing ploy?

Some of Ghost in the Machine’s obvious and timely points include the data centers tech companies pushed past feckless local politicians before citizens rose in bipartisan anger over the noisy, stinking, energy-sucking facilities. Our current president brandished a drawing of a projected data center the size of Manhattan; his “White House AI Action Plan” is an explicitly ideological manifesto, supported by toadying tech titans seeking to fend off restrictions on their power and wealth.

The deeper history behind AI as told in the film is revealing and disturbing. McCarthy wasn’t alone among the forerunners and founders of Silicon Valley to claim women and wide swaths of ethnicity lack the potential for the genius they claimed for themselves. Those lesser humans might just as well be replaced by machines. Ghost in the Machine begins its history lesson with Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics. Darwin was certainly open to the idea of racial hierarchy but Galton codified racism into a “science” of hereditary inequality. Galton proposed that a new race could be bred from the best Northern European stock, a process aided by sterilizing the unfit. California and Indiana were among the U.S. states to enact eugenic laws, whose mandatory sterilization policies were inspirational for Tay’s beloved Fuhrer.

Galton’s measurement of human capacity (based on “racial” characteristics) also inspired culturally biased IQ testing, which long past his life continued to echo his theories of racial, biological and intellectual inferiority. Galton’s many followers in academia spurred the statistical sciences and the “general intelligence” concept that undergird the principles of computer science

Despite Tay’s doubts about the Holocaust, the reputation of eugenics suffered after Nazism’s defeat, yet the eugenicists lived on and shaped the ideological assumptions of many computer pioneers. Oxford’s Gilbert Ryle coined the phrase “ghost in the machine” to disparage the thought that consciousness was anything but a product of physical systems, i.e. the circuitry of the brain.

Defining human consciousness in machine-computer terms took hold at Stanford, the heart of what became Silicon Valley, where a cohort, indoctrinated with Ayn Rand, foresaw a male genius elite to lead the way to a new world. William Shockley, the man behind transistors and semiconductors, became Silicon Valley’s godfather. Shockley recoined eugenics as “dysgenics,” openly worried about “down-breeding” and inspired such thinkers as Robert Jastrow, who hoped computers would mold “the great new intelligent race of the future.”

The speed of tech development hastened in the ‘80s with the advent of personal computers and microchips, allowing the new technology to permeate and dominate our lives. Enter Ray Kurzweiler’s “Singularity,” claiming (select) humans and (advanced) computers will merge. Even as AI agents, created in the likeness of dubious philosophies, appear to be gaining volition, many of Ghost in the Machine’s speakers think AI is hype to speed the money-go-round of investment. Will it be a bubble about to burst or Skynet come true?

5:15 p.m., September 26 at the Oriental Theatre, as part of Milwaukee Film’s Dialogues Documentary Festival.