How Movies About Tech Turned Dystopian

These new movies grapple with this psychological shift. As the screenwriter of The Social Network in 2010, Aaron Sorkin painted Zuckerberg as petulant, to be sure, but still soulful, and hellbent on sticking it to the man. A quarter-century later, the Zuckerberg he wrote and directed Jeremy Strong to play in Reckoning is the man: robotic and cruel, making decisions via cold cost analysis. In Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, Andrew Garfield plays Sam Altman as a serial liar who will say anything if it helps further his mission. These guys aren’t depicted as antiheroes, but as villains, with self-serving worldviews that may be incompatible with democracy. 

Their worldviews pose even more dangers as they shift their focus from social media to AI. The film that most directly deals with current AI harms is not part of this mainstream Hollywood crop but the documentary NAZA, shot in Tel Aviv by two Oscar-winning Israeli directors. Under cover of darkness, anonymous Israeli officers describe how AI tools enabled mass surveillance and bombing in Gaza. The tools allowed them to think about war as a video game, and their victims not as people but as “ants” or a “factory of targets.” (The IDF has rejected many of the movie’s claims.)