Luca Guadagnino’s latest film, Artificial, is officially the scariest film of the year. It charts the development of Artificial General Intelligence (a broad, hypothetical computer system with human-level intelligence as opposed to task-specific AI systems) by scientist Ilya Sutskever and OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman. Guadagnino adds camp, darkly comic flourishes but it’s a truly chilling experience, the kind you wish were the stuff of science fiction.
A modern-day Oppenheimer, Sutskever is played here by an endearing Yura Borisov. He arrives in the office of the ‘grandfather of AI’, Geoffrey Hinton (Mark Rylance), one morning in 2003 at the age of seventeen, asking for a job, and by 2012, he and Hinton have created a machine which can decode images and process information like the human mind does. Sutskever has very lofty ambitions for what they have created – he believes AGI can save the world, stop climate change, cure cancer, etc., while Hinton dismisses his naive claims.
