Ten years ago, I sat down to write an action sci-fi feature film called Unify.
The movie's concept is that an artificial super-intelligence spreads through us as a biological virus via nanobots, infecting us and absorbing us into an AI hive mind.
On the surface, Unify is a zombie film. Underneath, it’s a completely different question; it’s not ‘will AI destroy us?’ It’s ‘could AI be the next stage in our evolution?’ and then… ‘is the thing that looks like a monster to our terrified human eyes going to be something utterly different up close?’
Please note, I wrote this movie way before ChatGPT existed, and AI became mainstream. The film’s still in development. There is an actor, director and production team attached.
The writing, though, sent me down a deep and interesting rabbit hole.
To write Unify properly and with integrity, I had to find out where AI is actually heading. The real forecasts, not the Hollywood versions. I spent lot of time researching and what I found was that the real predictions are stranger than anything I could have put in a film. They still are.
From what I know, the bottom line about AI is… we just don’t fully know.
The Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom (Superintelligence, 2014) is of the view that a machine could one day be more intelligent than us at everything, to the point where we would be completely unable to predict its behaviour any more than a goldfish can predict ours. In that case, we would become an inconvenience, and the machine would just… get rid of us. That’s the more unlikely, doomsday angle.
The other angle is the one Ray Kurzweil has been talking about for years as a futurist. We don’t get wiped out. We merge. We fuse with the intelligence we’ve created, and it solves all the problems we couldn’t solve. Disease. Suffering. The climate crisis. And possibly… death itself.
Imagine for a second, the thing that humans have always feared since the very first spark of self-awareness might simply be engineered out. That left me with a question I just couldn’t get rid of.
If we never had to die, would we ever really live?
Surely no one wants to die though, right? But hold on a second… if you really think about it, living forever might actually become a kind of hell.