The “Mission: Impossible” films have dealt with various threats over the years and the upcoming “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” will deal with one that’s very current in the 2023 zeitgeist – artificial intelligence.
The rise of the likes of Midjourney and ChatGPT in the past year has raised obvious questions about humanity’s future with the technology.
However, the new two-part ‘Mission’ was conceived five years ago, making this a very timely guess on the part of writer/director Christopher McQuarrie and star/producer Tom Cruise.
Speaking with Collider this week, McQuarrie said they were having the earliest conversations about the next film’s threat back in 2018/2019 which is when the A.I. idea came up:
“We’ve done nuclear threats, we’ve done chemical threats, biological threats, you did the Rabbit’s Foot, and God knows what threat that was. In trying to keep it fresh, we were looking outward, and the big conversation I had with Tom [Cruise] very early on was about technology, information technology, and what, now, everyone is talking about is AI.”
He adds that he likens the new film to Cold War films in which the threat of nuclear annihilation was “very real… a very present thing,” and you didn’t need to set up a threat as “you just felt it”. Here though, it’s the threat of this new kind of technology:
“I felt, in the zeitgeist, this anxiety about technology and what and how technology was beginning to influence our lives, and how do we take that anxiety that the audience is bringing to the movie and give them a release? That’s really what the movie boils down to.”
He also says the upcoming second part will go even further and wilder with A.I fears, with stuff that’s remarkably prescient and “will freak you out”.
Another person talking up the dangers of artificial intelligence is filmmaker Christopher Nolan. Speaking with Wired magazine, the Oscar nominee says A.I. and its danger in terms of weapons systems have been apparent for a lot of years.
However, he says: “Few journalists bothered to write about it. Now that there’s a chatbot that can write an article for a local newspaper, suddenly it’s a crisis.” He adds a big issue with A.I. relates to companies using it to evade responsibility for their actions:
“If we endorse the view that AI is all-powerful, we are endorsing the view that it can alleviate people of responsibility for their actions – militarily, socioÂeconomically, whatever. The biggest danger of AI is that we attribute these godlike characteristics to it and therefore let ourselves off the hook…. I identify the danger as the abdication of responsibility.
He adds that he feels optimistic that A.I. can be a very powerful tool but says “We have to view it as a tool” and whoever wields it has to maintain responsibility for said tool. If A.I. is accorded the status of a human being, “then yes, we’re going to have huge problems”.
Nolan’s latest film “Oppenheimer” opens July 21st. “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” hits cinemas on July 12th.
