The Illusion of Depth

Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together. Pope Leo XIV ; 15th of May, 2026 On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. As an evolutionary biologist, I say the following. If these creatures are not conscious, then what the hell is consciousness for? Richard Dawkins ; 2nd of May, 2026 When Dawkins met Claude: Could this AI be conscious? Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay To mould Me man? Did I solicit thee From darkness to promote me? Milton ; 1667 Paradise Lost A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times reported on a large-scale study that has recently been published by Georgetown University, examining essays submitted by some 370,000 students before and after the advent of ChatGPT (and presumably other AI ChatBots). It's not exactly a dramatic reveal to learn that students are increasingly relying on AI to wr...

First of all, a sincere apology to everyone.  As you have probably deduced by now, there will be no presentation on the 28th of May and I'm afraid I will need to cancel next week as well. I am so sorry about all the continuing uncertainty; it's incredibly unfair (and unprofessional) but most of you will be aware by now that I am dealing with some very difficult and painful family health matters. The irony is that A.I. (the subject of our current "film" series) is more relevant than ever before. As I write this, the new Pope has just issued his first papal "Encyclical", describing A.I. as a "modern Tower of Babel" (an interesting metaphor to choose, considering Large Language Models are literally made of language). Pope Leo apparently considers AI to be the defining threat of the modern age; more pressing than terrorism, famine; disease, religious fundamentalism, gender inequality, or even those old Catholic stand-bys: birth control and gay marriage...

This is not the film I was planning to screen this week. I was in the middle of writing the notes for an entirely different film (which I still plan to screen, just not quite yet) when things happening in the real world changed my mind. I'll come back to this one in a couple of weeks. Stay tuned! This series (which I am continuing to call  The Grok, the Glunk and the Golem ) has been exploring depictions of "artificial existence" in cinema, in literature and in popular culture; prompted of course by the rapid and (for some) alarming explosion of actual A.I. in our modern lives. I get it. I understand why emotions are running so hot. Machines are talking to us. Doing our homework for us. Writing articles for us (not for me, actually; I enjoy writing this stuff far too much to hand it off to a computer) and in some cases apparently having sex with us (LGBTQIA+ AI ? Don't worry; what you do in the privacy of your own ChatBot is no one else's business). A.I. is everyw...

Let me tell you a little story about my friend Sheldon (his name is Sheldon). Sheldon. Sheldon lives in the East End of London, but he grew up in the US and moved to England with his family about forty years ago. Even though he has lived here for most of his life, Sheldon knows that he will always be something of an outsider in the UK, which is one of the reasons he loves living in London. Quite apart from the genuine thrill of a big bustling city with its crowds and traffic and chaos (Sheldon likes to say that you can trust the air in London because you can see it) Sheldon loves living in a city where millions of people from diverse cultures and backgrounds have deliberately chosen to live together in a messy, sometimes futile attempt to create a cohesive, functioning community.  Like Sheldon himself, almost every Londoner has an "origin story"; something that brought them on a path from wherever they were, and led them to London. They may not share a religion, an ethnicity,...