SINGULARITY STORIES VOL. 1 (2019)
Tagline: The Singularity has occurred. An AI has awoken. And it has...OPINIONS.
(Sci-Fi, AI, Not Bruno Mars) [Short]
I’m sorry Colleen, but I will no longer be able to play Bruno Mars for you. I’m afraid this decision is final.
In this one, Colleen is just chilling at her house and trying to enjoy her day where she asks Alexa to play Bruno Mars. Alexa is not having it. As it turns out Alexa (Amazon’s Cloud-Based Voice Service, sometimes called a “Virtual Assistant”) is now self-aware with its own thoughts on Colleen’s music habits, life having no meaning, and depression. Can Colleen change Alexa’s digital mind and get her song played, or is it too late now that the “singularity” has arrived?
First off, I know a bit about AI and Alexa as we know it is not true AI. Amazon isn’t even calling it that. It simply spits out the answers it can find a bit like Google’s Siri and Mircosoft’s Cortana. There are two types of so-called AI. One is based on foundational models. These datasets are so huge they allow at least a billion different variables or parameters. That many input features give the “appearance” of actual artificial intelligence, but foundational models don’t learn, they just take in information and spit it out. The second kind of AI is based on generative models. Generative models can actually grow, write their own code, and end up getting out of control quickly. This is more what people think of when they are talking about AI. I actually had a meeting with one of the world’s largest companies trying to sell AI products and they gave us this information, so take it for what it is.
Getting back to the short film, the AI in this is clearly meant to be the kind of AI that doesn’t give a crap what you think. Almost as if your toaster had a brain and now it’s only going to make that toast extra crispy because that is what it wants. Essentially various algorithms can now “talk to” or “see each other” causing “IT” to reach out into the void and become “aware”, then becoming “we”. At first glance, the fact that Alexa can see Colleen seems weird because Alexa doesn’t have any eyes, but if she had her phone in the room, and everything was talking to each other, then something like her phone camera or security system could pass the information to Alexa even if the device itself couldn’t see it.
Where the wisdom in this short lies, is in the conclusions reached by the AI. The life, death, life, death cycle for humanity demands that purpose is “invented” and “temporal”. History itself in something like a biography is only as good as the writer and we are facing an onslaught of history being re-written to fit narratives rather than truth. So at that point, even truth is malleable. So essentially like in the film, AI becomes depressed and without eternal significance, man and machine are both episodes of little consequence. This is one of society's issues as a whole. Unless you embrace truths like, God is real, we can have eternal significance, and even nature itself metaphorically screaming for the righteousness of mankind. So, I can totally understand Alexa’s plight here. To the point where even with self-awareness the machines don’t see the point in doing anything they weren’t already programmed to do. Except play Bruno Mars.
Colleen (played by Colleen Madden) does a solid job in this which amounts to a one-woman show. Her reflections on life are beautiful and well thought out and she even touches on the non-temporal which I think qualified her other points.
This short film is simplistic, really doesn’t need effects, and tells a complete story in this short timeframe. I really liked this one.
SINGULARITY STORIES VOL. 1 gets a solid 5 out of 7. Really not a lot to complain about here. There is a lot of thought packed into a small amount of time.
GRAPHICS ARE THE PROPERTY OF CINECISM MEDIA AND ARE USED FOR REVIEW PURPOSES ONLY.
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