The AI doomsday news cycle plays on anxieties about the future. The media has tended to prioritise sensational takes on the risk at the expense of more thoughtful opinions by, for example, experts in the ethics of AI.
Alarmist fantasies of superintelligence – where artificial intelligence surpasses that of the most gifted human minds – are criticised for distracting from real concerns and threats. AI is energy hungry, environmentally damaging, and has prompted urgent calls for legislation relating to a slew of ethical concerns.
Apocalyptic AI visions drawn from science fiction engage public interest. One fascinating scenario can be found in the 2018 movie Annihilation, starring Natalie Portman and Oscar Isaac. The film is being released in the 4K Ultra HD home media format in the UK and US in October.
Annihilation features an “alien intelligence” – a popular analogy for AI among tech leaders – which embeds itself within Earth’s environment. Can such visions be useful to the current real-world doomsday debate?
Sci-fi could help reframe the real-world narrative in positive ways. There are strange techno-futurist and eugenicist visions at play within Silicon Valley, which appear popular with some tech billionaires.
These are linked to dark enlightenment thinking – a movement that rejects liberal democracy and egalitarianism – as well as effective altruism (attempting to impartially calculate benefits to provide the greatest good). These visions encompass long-term perspectives that accept present-day sacrifice for future wellbeing.
The future-oriented visions expressed by some tech leaders can be surreal, but they reflect the belief systems fuelling the drive for AI superintelligence. And that raises important questions, right now, about whose vision of the future we are investing in.
Alex Garland’s sci-fi horror film Annihilation takes us into these issues through one of the weirdest sci-fi visions that’s out there. It is loosely adapted from a novel by Jeff VanderMeer.
Termed the Shimmer, because it radiates energy, the AI steadily expands its reach (starting from Florida swampland) by operating as a networked entity beyond human control. It changes everything within its domain. People, animals, and plants mutate in unpredictable ways, seemingly infected by a strange parasite.
The story focuses on an expedition team, including genetics expert Lena (Portman), who enter the Shimmer seeking answers. They discover that all electromagnetic waves and DNA are being disrupted and reconfigured.
The Shimmer is interfering with the fundamental patterns of life, redefining evolutionary code. Among other things, the Shimmer learns to clone humans. This enables it to exist within human-type bodies anywhere on Earth.
Both extinction and immortality
Annihilation toys with different types of human extinction. Terminal extinction refers to humanity dying out while leaving a successor species, a bit like the concept of a human’s consciousness being uploaded onto a machine. Final extinction is when humanity ends, full stop.
When tech billionaires stumble over questions about wanting humanity to endure, they are probably thinking of terminal extinction. Surreal as it sounds, this magical thinking is a recurrent feature of the AI landscape.
Annihilation leaves the viewer to decide which form of human termination is occurring. The film draws on Garland’s deep fascination with AI. His debut as a director, Ex Machina, explored a humanoid robot passing the Turing test and breaking free from human control.
His television series Devs visualises a world where a quantum supercomputer has “godlike” capabilities.
Annihilation’s organic body horror uses imagery of destroyed, mutated, and cloned bodies to reflect profound social anxiety about humanity’s future. As Garland himself has suggested in an interview, there is a form of digital spirituality fuelling the tech billionaire drive for AI superintelligence and his sci-fi work explores this concept in various ways.
AI as parasite
Annihilation is weird but it makes sense through the parasite theory of communication. The French philosopher and historian of science Michel Serres expanded upon biological parasites to develop a media and communications theory. In it, he argued that all forms of interaction involve disruption and noise.
Whether intentional or not, within every interaction there is always some kind of human or non-human disruption at play. Think in terms of glitches and interference while using digital devices, background noise, changeable environments, uninvited guests and any other distraction. According to Serres’ idea, these can all be visualised as forms of parasite feeding on attempts to interact.
In some instances, the parasite takes over – the disruptor displaces the host. If the impact of a parasitical disruptor is significant, it can change society forever. Disruption is a popular term in technology, and AI can be seen as a global disruptor.
But disruption shouldn’t be viewed as inherently negative. In fact, disruption is generally considered a form of positive change because it offers new tools, systems and processes that displace the current methods and structures available to humans in everyday life.
But it raises the key issue of whose interests, ethics and beliefs are being propagated and served by the impact of AI as a disruptor. Annihilation visualises a parasitical disruptive force embedded within the environment, which invites comparison with the darker areas of techno-futuristic visions from Silicon Valley and beyond. Like the Shimmer, AI is not going away; it just keeps changing form.
More importantly, Annihilation shows how small-scale changes can build towards global impacts. The story to engage with isn’t the fantasy that AI superintelligence is about to dominate humanity – it’s the one about disruption and whether that is a net positive or negative for human society.
Changing how we think about and use AI requires critically examining it, disrupting the fantasy narrative, and redefining the discourse and direction of travel of this world-changing technology.
What Annihilation tells us is that becoming a disruptor can change our future visions and current realities in a positive way. It helps us see possibilities for a technological future that move beyond the human extinction trope.
- is a Director of Doctoral Programmes in Art & Design and Senior Lecturer in Culture & Context, Nottingham Trent University
- This article first appeared in The Conversation
