Artificial intelligence, its future and its potential regulation are among the hot-button topics on many people’s minds these days. Now, there is a film that allows you to watch some of the world’s brightest minds take on AI in war games, strategy exercises used in military and other contexts to test and improve tactical options and expertise by putting decision-makers under pressure by simulating aspects of a conflict. Oscar-and BAFTA-winning filmmaker Elena Andreicheva‘s documentary Intelligence Rising has captured the experience for the big screen.
The new film from the producer and director (short film Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You’re a Girl), TV series Drugs, Inc.) world premieres on Sunday, March 15, in the F:act Award section of the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, CPH:DOX, whose 23rd edition runs through March 22.
“The future is all to play for,” highlight the press notes for Intelligence Rising. “Global heavyweights – from military strategists to philosophers – join AI leader Marc Warner for a bold war game exploring how artificial intelligence might reshape power itself,” they explain. “Intelligence Rising reveals what happens when the brightest minds face the future they helped create.”
Warner is the CEO of Faculty AI, which he founded to “help organizations make better decisions using human-led AI,” as the company’s website notes. The AI entrepreneur and father “has spent most of his life developing artificial intelligence,” notes the CPH:DOX website. “Now he spends most of his time wondering whether that was a good idea.”
Among the lineup of other minds featured in the film are the likes of General Patrick Sanders, the former head of the British Army, former World Bank economist Patricia Geli, Skype creator Jaan Tallinn, Lucy Lim, research scientist in Google DeepMind’s Frontier and Safety team, retired U.S. General Stanley McChrystal, U.S. economist Pippa Malmgren, and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari.
Directed by Andreicheva and produced by her, Sean Richard, Mandy Chang and Paula Comley, Intelligence Rising features cinematography by Harry Truman. Bradley Richards, Angus Sutherland and Frank Frumento edited the doc. Autlook Filmsales is handling sales. Watch a trailer for the doc here.
Ahead of its world premiere, Andreicheva talked to THR about the genesis of the film, putting a who’s who of power brokers and thinkers into a room to address possible and likely future scenarios relating to AI, the debate over AI as a tool versus an agent, and her takeaways from the experience.
“Normally, I spend ages developing my own stories, but in this instance, it was the reverse,” the filmmaker recalls. “Marc Warner, who’s in the film, and I went to university together. We were actually lab partners. So, we are long-time friends. In one of our meetups, I remember him starting to talk about being quite worried about what’s going on with AI.”
The topic came up again later. “After his son had been born, he rang me up and said, ‘Okay, I’m going to do something. I think the best way to do this is to do it as a war game, where you can try and find the right answers to some of the questions about what we’re supposed to do,” the director says. “‘Do you think that might make an interesting doc?’ And I turned it over in my head a couple of times and was like, ‘Oh, yeah.’ So, in this instance, sadly, it was not an original idea coming from the depths of my brain.”
As Intelligence Rising unfolds, war game scenes are interspersed with scenes of Warner with his wife and son Tommy, who becomes a human mirror of sorts for AI, introducing the narrative that the way AI learns is not all that different from humans, just much more accelerated.
“That was something that came up pretty early,” Andreicheva tells THR. “I didn’t understand exactly how AI was learning and wondering, ‘What’s the problem Marc sees?’ So, in the process of explaining it to me, Marc would mention Tommy, who is a bit younger than my kids. At some point, we got into this analogy for how AI learns. A thing I really, really hate is this idea that something is all far too complicated, so we all couldn’t possibly grasp it anyway. It’s this idea that AI is a black box, so let’s not even bother. I don’t buy that. I don’t think that’s right. This technology is going to change our world.”
The director also felt that the “crazy beast” of the war game scenes needed to be interrupted by family scenes, “these quieter moments where we learn a little bit to understand how this entity might develop and the point at which we might get worried.” That’s where the child analogy comes in. “The reality is, you can be very prescriptive, and you can teach your kids things, but there comes a point when they just start doing stuff on their own. And that is the analogy to get people to understand that with AI, we also don’t have full control. And the learning is happening in a weirdly similar way.”
How did Intelligence Rising get its big-name talent lineup? “The caliber of their expertise is really fab, but it was quite a bit of touch and go there for a while, if people would show up,” the filmmaker says. “The film team and Marc and his team worked together and put our heads together and tried to get as many really plugged-in people as possible.”
One of the memorable scenes in Intelligence Rising sees the experts debating a future scenario related to Artificial General Intelligence, a state where AI matches or surpasses human intelligence across cognitive tasks. “The teams representing the leaders of the People’s Republic of China and the United States, two entities racing for AI supremacy, felt things were escalating a bit, but maybe they could still have this under control,” recalls Andreicheva.
Harari is shown in the film arguing that AI is not a tool, but an agent, even an alien agent. “This debate has all to do with the fact that it is not a tool if you want real intelligence, if you want AI to be really capable to be useful,” shares the filmmaker. “It has to be connected to the internet, and you have to give it a lot of data and a lot of capabilities. If you want AI to utilize its intelligence in a really broad, useful way, you have to give it a great deal of freedom, and at that point, it becomes extremely difficult to lock it down. But it can never get that good if you keep it in this tiny box. So my takeaway was that we need to be thinking about this much earlier [than many people may realize]. It’s about timing rather than the particular mode of control.”
Actually, “I think that was really one of the learnings for some of the players in the game,” too, Andreicheva tells THR. “A lot of governments just assume they’ll be able to pull the plug on Ai. I think it’s just naive to think you could just [use a so-called kill switch] or ask it nicely.” That is also one of the reasons why the doc maker shares that she hopes Intelligence Rising will also make its way to people “in the corridors of power.”
What were the big takeaways from the Intelligence Rising experience for Andreicheva? “I was just so focused on making the film and hearing all these things that it took a while for it to land,” she shares. “I had my first AI nightmare about a year and a half in. It involved metal tentacles. Anyway, I was left thinking I don’t think we can put [the] AI [genie] back in the bottle. I think this is going to be quite transformative, but in which direction is hard to say at this point.”
The director hopes audiences of Intelligence Rising will also come away with a thought that she took away. “What I can do is think a little bit more about the future,” Andreicheva tells THR. “I can think about how things might change and what that means. And I can ask important questions, such as: Do we want a world where we don’t work and robots do things?”
