Valerie Veatch: Director, Writer, Editor, Producer
Valerie Veatch is a director, writer, editor, and producer who made her feature debut at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival with Me @ The Zoo for HBO. Her follow-up, Love Child also premiered at Sundance, making Valerie the youngest director ever to debut two feature films at that festival.
And now she’s back at Sundance with Ghost in the Machine. It’s a self-funded investigative essay documentary that excavates the philosophical, cultural, and political forces driving the global AI boom, and traces the links between artificial intelligence and eugenics.
It asks who is really building AI, who is being exploited to make it function, and what humans might become on the other side of it.
Overview
Veatch states that the AI hype is a fever that will pass - and that anthropomorphizing these systems feeds the egos and ideas of the the hands of people consolidating power and controlling the future. Ghost in the Machine tells the story of AI - Veatch goes all the way back to the origins of this story in Victorian-era eugenics, statistics, and IQ measurement, and frames “machines that think” as a centuries-old project that rests on an illegitimate and unethical intellectual foundation.
Interview High Points
Late Victorian era: Francis Galton, Karl Pearson, Charles Spearman invent modern statistics specifically to serve eugenics.
Post-WWII: Gilbert Ryle (whose godfather was Karl Pearson, brother ran the Eugenics Society) writes The Concept of Mind — coining the phrase “ghost in the machine.” Ryle also had the interesting idea that women, animals, and babies should be rated lower on his own cognitive scale.
Alan Turing: Veatch discusses where Turing published his “thinking machine” paper, the year after Ryle’s book. The work that she does here demonstrates that much of the underpinning ideas are steeped in rankable-intelligence thinking.
Bottom-Line: The same intellectually fraught framework derived from Galton, Pearson, Ryle and Turing drives today’s AI overblown hype.
Platforming Storytellers: Women rarely get asked to predict the future of tech. Veatch’es work has not gotten the exposure of other mainstream AI-documentaries that foreground and platform AI “doomers” and AI “visionaries.”
Veatch’s prediction: In 10 years, Valerie Veatch believes that AI hype will look like the metaverse or the Tamagotchi - embarrassing and overblown in retrospect.
Distribution of Documentary
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