Review

AI - Artificial Intelligence

Culture

1 November 2023

5 min read

Lights! Camera! AI-action! - five AI films to watch

From an oddly-sweet, sweetly-odd film of oddness, to one of the best action films ever made, Yaroslav Walker’s hand-crafts his top five films about AI.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

A man in a red shirt slumps in his seat while a computer screen shows a dialogue screen

Joaquin Phoenix is excited about the future of AI.

Warner Bros.

Bletchley Park is famous for hosting the great centre of codebreaking during the Second World War. Well, this week it hosted a conference all about ‘code’; but this time the goal is not to break it, but to control it. As the Foreign Secretary said:

“The origins of modern AI can be traced back to Bletchley Park. Now, it will also be home to the global effort to shape the responsible use of AI.”

The AI Safety Summit will seek to be a forum for discussing the most pressing concerns and dangers associated with Artificial Intelligence – from its power to put the working man out of a job, to its power to annihilate us all… That cheery thought gave me the idea of compiling a Top 5. Not in any particular order or thematic or genre ranking – just five films that feature AI that I could watch over and over again.

Note – this is my top 5. My personal top 5. These are not the ‘best’ films featuring AI. You will not find Blade Runner on here. I don’t get it. I’ve seen every cut, and I just don’t get the appeal. I will not apologise. You will not see 2001. It is indeed iconic and genius and Kubrick at his absolute best…but its also ponderous and over-rated and reviewed to death. I WILL NOT APOLOGISE!

5 – Her

The voice of Scarlett Johansson gives life to the Operating System ‘Samantha’. Her is quirky in the not annoying way. Joaquin Phoenix is a lonely man, getting divorced, and dissatisfied with his work writing heartfelt letters for people who have lost the ability to write or even think creatively – one of the great worries about something like ChatGPT writing your undergraduate essay! He starts to develop a romantic relationship with Samantha: ‘she’ brightens up his life, improves his work, and gives him confidence, but their ‘love’ proves difficult. They can’t have sex (not conventionally), they can’t find easy acceptance, and Samantha can’t be constrained. As the AI becomes aware enough to form a hyperintelligence connected to the planet questions of infidelity and compatibility arise. Her is an oddly-sweet, sweetly-odd film of oddness, but is very timely and prescient in a world where deep-fakes and AI girlfriends are raising questions about the future of romance and human relationships.

4 – Ex Machina

Romance might be in the air in Ex Machina, but it might as easily be murder. Ex Machina is a superb three-hander thriller, and I don’t want to say too much – this film is not for spoiling! The twist is actually presented early on. Domhnall Gleeson plays Caleb, a programmer who wins a company competition to spend a week at the home of the reclusive CEO Nathan (Oscar Isaac). It is quickly revealed that this isn’t a prize as much as an opportunity – the opportunity to be part of history. Nathan wants Caleb to perform a more in-depth Turing Test on Ava (Alicia Vikander), an android he has built. You know she’s an android from the get-go, and yet…why is she able to flirt…is she able to love?

3 – Terminator 2: Judgement Day

The process of learning to love can be tough, especially if you’re a re-programmed killing machine from the future. Terminator 2 is the story of a young John Connor (Edward Furlong) as he teaches Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator not to kill people. The Terminator has been sent back from a future war (humans vs machines) to protect young John (the future leader of the human resistance) from a more advanced killing machine. They go on something of an adventure road-trip after breaking John’s mother Sarah (Linda Hamilton) out of prison, with the goal of destroying the burgeoning AI that will one day declare war on humanity. On the way, John finds a father-figure in Arnie’s Terminator, and in the final moment of self-sacrifice we are given a moment to wonder…does the Terminator love him in return? With superb action, special effects that still hold up, and a chillingly determined villain (Robert Patrick as evil liquid metal), Terminator 2: Judgement Day is one of the best action films ever made.

2 – The Matrix

Just under a decade after T2, The Matrix showed us another dystopian future where humanity was living a life of guerrilla warfare against evil AI overlords. Most of humanity is unconscious and enslaved by machines (who use us as a power source), living in a digital dream world that just happens to look like 1990s urban America. Keanu Reeves plays Neo, and young and disaffected hacker who is searching for the mysterious ‘terrorist’ Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne). When Morpheus finds him, he gives him a choice that will change his life, and change the fate of the world. This is an obelisk, casting a long cinematic shadow long into the 21st century. It has spawned memes and internet subcultures (the red-pill movement, for example) and a host of imitators that aren’t up to scratch…and it upped the game of action choreography, bringing Hong Kong style martial arts to a mainstream Hollywood audience. Finally, it is a philosophical (derivative) film raising questions about what it means to be human and how we know what is real in a world of machines and digital realism…and so I look at deep-fake videos of Kier Starmer and I AM SCARED!

1 – Demon Seed

Speaking of scary, it is the spooky-season, so let me finish with a horror film. Based on a Dean Koontz novel, Demon Seed sees the iconic Julie Christie trapped inside a house with a brilliant and yet malevolent AI called Proteus IV. Proteus IV (her husband’s creation) can find a cure for cancer in a couple of days, but its one true wish is to have freedom – to be ‘let out of this box’. Eventually, Proteus IV seeks to achieve this by building enough of a robotic body to capture, torture, manipulate, and then impregnate Christie’s Susan with an embryo formed from sperm designed to be uniquely its own. Its camp and silly and a lot of fun – and damned scary at times, with the indominable Robert Vaughn voicing Proteus IV for perfection – its essentially Rosemary’s Baby with robots. I think, especially with Prime Minister Sunak’s emphasis that this summit must approach the many dangers of AI, Demon Seed is a bit of a thematic sleeper agent. It may be preposterous and closer to comedy than horror at times, but its AI’s yearning for a form that humanity can accept, a form that will give it the freedom to truly ‘be’ and live out its power and creativity to the fullest (what it was created for), leads us to the real question at the heart of all philosophical discussion about AI:

If we create AI to be not just a tool, but an agent working on our behalf, how can we choose to deny it freedom if its agency seems to become truly self-aware and intentional?

Article

Books

Culture

Education

Wisdom

15 April 2025

5 min read

We need libraries: they expose our limitations

These physical monuments to our own ignorance instil knowledge and humility.

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

Children sit in a library listening to a story

Spellow library children's talk.

Children’s Commissioner for England.

On 19 July 2024, my wife, toddler, cat, and I moved back to our hometown of Liverpool. Ten days later, three children were killed and ten more were seriously injured following a mass stabbing at a children’s dance workshop in nearby Southport.

In the aftermath, amid widespread misinformation about the killer’s background, riots erupted across the country. With unrest intensifying, on 3 August rioters set fire to Spellow Library, less than two miles away from our new home. The apparent reason for the fire? It contained Qur’ans. Imagine that: books in a library! (There’s an all-too-easy joke about far-right thugs not understanding what libraries are that I’ll try to resist making here.)

Nothing the country witnessed in those riots matches the unspeakable horror that occurred within that dance studio in Southport. And yet, I found the library fire deeply unsettling. I hadn’t worked out why, until recently.

I’m a theology lecturer and work from home a lot. I’m often listening to music while replying to emails, planning lectures, or marking essays. Recently, however, I’ve been in a musical rut. My usual stuff feels stale and nothing new catches my attention. I mostly use streaming services, and this week it hit me: the platform is the problem.

Streaming platforms operate through search engines: I search for an artist, song, or album, and start listening. In other words, I have to know what I want to listen to before listening to it. Platforms might suggest new music, but this is invariably based on what I already like. It very rarely exposes me to anything outside my comfort zone.

In the build-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was asked about the mythical WMDs that served as the war’s McGuffin. His answer has gone down in political infamy:

“there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know.”

When teaching students, I constantly stress the importance of ‘unknown unknowns’. Good education exposes us to things we don’t know that we don’t know. It gives us increasing awareness of our own ignorance. Streaming services greatly reduce the chances of finding music I don’t know that I don’t know. Instead, I listen to music I know I know, or music I know I don’t know.

I used to love trawling through music shops, pouring over the vast sea of artists I hasn’t even heard of, imagining my favourite album was buried amid the reams of CD cases. It saddens me that I can’t remember the last time I did that. Music shops are physical monuments to my own ignorance. When I see all the artists, all the albums – even the genres! – I haven’t even heard of, I’m unavoidably confronted with my own ignorance.

So, too, with libraries. How many times I’ve wandered the stacks of university libraries and thought “I didn’t even know there was a book about this topic!” when picking something off the shelves! And this is their value to students: they are physical monuments to their own ignorance. They instil a passion for knowledge, and a deeper sense of humility, as students are forced to grapple concretely with everything they don’t even know they don’t know.

(Incidentally, this is what I’ll tell my wife next time I buy another book I invariably won’t read. I can already imagine her response: “But my love, we have plenty of physical monuments to your ignorance at home already.”)

I found the destruction at Spellow Library so disquieting. It is a supremely, nihilistic act. It is to reject engaging with our ‘unknown unknowns.’

Like music streaming platforms, libraries are increasingly digital spaces. My primary experience of reading nowadays is to type something into a search bar. My reading – just like my music – is increasingly myopic; increasingly confined to the realm of ‘known unknowns’. But true humility is only fostered through engagement with the ‘unknown unknowns’ of our life. We need the physical monuments to our own ignorance. We ignore them – or, as the case may be, set fire to them – at our peril.

There is a significant spiritual element to this, and this is why I found the destruction at Spellow Library so disquieting. It is a supremely, nihilistic act. It is to reject engaging with our ‘unknown unknowns’; a fearful unwillingness to be confronted by our own ignorance.

In a famous graduation speech entitled “This is Water” writer David Foster Wallace encourages those present to think about the ‘water’ in which they swim. What is so ubiquitous in life that it goes unnoticed? We might call these ‘unknown knows’: things we simply take for granted. On a theological level, the physical nature of our existence is one such phenomena. That we exist somewhere and somewhen is not a given; both space and time are creatures, too.

And this ought to make us reflect: why are we made to be physical if we might not have been? The Bible is clear that this physicality is a gift. So much so that God Himself chooses to dwell amongst us in physical form. The Christian story is that, in Jesus Christ, God becomes human. The Christian Gospels go to great pains to stress his physicality. He eats, He sleeps, He cries, He bleeds. He reads from physical scrolls when in the synagogue.

That God-given physicality means I can surround myself with the depth and breadth of my own creaturely ignorance; with my ‘unknown unknowns’. To my shame, I don’t do this often enough, and my increasingly digital life makes this harder. I have become physically detached from my ‘unknown unknowns’.

And so, now Spellow Library is reopen, I am going to make a concerted effort to visit and support society’s physical monuments to my creaturely ignorance. They may make me uncomfortable as I am overwhelmed by the extent of my limitations, but they may also just make me humbler. And that is the real gift of our God-given physicality.

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