Last weekend, my wife and I went to see the newest Mission: Impossible movie. It was dreadful. I fell asleep. But I also spotted something important buried in the summer blockbuster detritus.
First, I should admit I’m late to this party; Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning came out in May. But this isn’t a movie review. What I want to point out is that this is the latest in a trend of movies that are warning us about the real-world dangers of the technologies we’ve created.
As for the film itself, I think NPR pop culture critic John Powers was right: “Predictably, this new movie is overblown, inanely plotted, clotted with expository dialogue and boundlessly self-congratulatory. But, you know, it’s also fun to watch.”
But the movie attempted one important mission which, if successful, might save us all. It is probably the biggest film budget ever committed to illustrating the corrosive effects of social media and AI.
The plot was about an all-powerful AI called The Entity bent on tearing humanity apart by stoking division and war, lying to people and nations to get them to turn on each other. We get the obvious metaphor because we already have the Entity here in the real world, we just call it Big Tech algorithms.
This was not the first screenplay to address this topic — not by a long shot. Stories like Black Mirror, The Circle, Spree, Nerve and even the Will Ferrell/Ryan Reynolds holiday musical Spirited have all warned us.
So has the news. On the week I saw Mission: Impossible, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, apologized for its Grok chatbot labeling itself the “MechaHitler” and praising the idea of a new holocaust in defense of white people. And Politico reported on discussions among leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints about how to rein in the Entity-esque social media habits of Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, who sometimes angry-tweets as often as every 15 minutes, leaving one to wonder when he has time for other things like, you know, his job. If algorithms and AI can pry apart the LDS Church and a Republican senator, there’s no limit to how utterly they can shred e pluribus unum.
The apocalyptic movies of the 1980s had villains unleashing robots to destroy us. This generation’s high-tech villains are smarter; they know we’ll destroy ourselves if given the right incentives.
But here’s where Hollywood may give us hope. (Don’t choke on that sentence, culture warriors.) Like it or not, Hollywood often sets the tone for our nation’s values. Like every culture in history, our shared morality is shaped by the stories we tell each other.
Millions of people have seen Cruise harness The Entity. As of Saturday night while I was dozing on the back row, the film had grossed $193 million, according to Box Office Mojo. And millions of those watchers will absorb the warnings about digital toxicity into our cultural canon.
With Hollywood making morality tales about our screen-powered disunity, the market for Mike Lee-style hatemongering may start to shrink. At least, that’s something to hope for.
If that happens, it will likely have two effects.
First, it will again reorganize the information ecosystem, pulling more people out of social media echo chambers and pushing them toward new platforms to stay informed. Ideally, those platforms will be news outlets with trained journalists and high standards, but, at this point, that mission seems impossible.
Second, it will make social media an even more toxic and false place than it already is as only the most committed extremists stay in the cesspool, sharing ever more outrageous lies that AI then amplifies.
The device which may turn out to be the unintentional genius of the Final Reckoning is that it casts the villain not as a media mogul or an app developer or a social media influencer, but as a disembodied robot — someone we’re all allowed to hate without falling for its tricks and hating each other.
The more Americans embrace the lessons of Mission: Impossible and films like it, the closer we may come to a time when the outrage machine runs out of gas and the greatest threat to American solidarity is defeated like a smirking spy master.
That’s a plot line I would stay awake for.