Yesterday I went to see Tron: Ares at the cinema, and found it exciting and enjoyable: a solid three star (out of five) movie of the "worth watching" category.
I had not seen the male lead Jared Leto before, or at least I don't recall seeing him; and I found him a very good actor with definite screen presence. He seems to have considerable scope - including understated comedy.
The rest of the acting was okay or decent; except female lead Greta Lee who was moderately sub par - neither a good actor, nor having star quality; but this didn't much matter in the action-orientated context of the movie.
What I found interesting as I left the cinema, was to reflect - yet again - on how often a modern mega-corporation with net-evil motivations, produces movies that at least seem to be about the intrinsically evil nature of modern mega-corporations...
This was particularly strange, given that Tron: Ares has a happy (albeit cursorily so) ending which involves the intrinsic evil being overcome, and a mega-corps made net-beneficial to humanity - simply by having a nice person in charge!
The threadbare notion of a benign dictator "setting all to rights" in an intrinsically corrupt world; is still (for lack of alternatives, perhaps) a governing wishful delusion for many people.
Witness that (albeit very brief!) episode earlier this year when so many people expressed intense and joyful - and insanely optimistic - fantasies of just this kind, when DT became US president.
The other aspect I found intriguing was how Ares frames the "AI" aspect; given that this is currently (and during the production of this movie) perhaps the numero uno socio-political strategy of the totalitarians in the the Western Establishment.
In sum: throughout Tron: Ares "AI" is assumed to be - and is presented as - functionally powerful, in a way that it just cannot be.
The whole world of "AI" is visually-depicted as overwhelmingly vast and sophisticated, its progression and take-over happening with a stream-roller inevitability - a combination that induces in the audience a kind of awed-helplessness.
Furthermore; it is both shown in the script and explicitly asserted that these "AI" systems are genius-like; in that they are creatively problem-solving.
This superhuman creativity is harnessed to the usual left-progressive agenda - which is to reduce/eliminate particular forms of human suffering and environmental damage.
Because of "AI"'s steamroller effectiveness, this fantasy of progress is given an apparent inevitability... if only we can ensure "the right people" are "in charge".
And - most strikingly - we are (yet again) shown that "singularity-moment" whereby sufficiently-advanced "AI" will develop agency, autonomy, human characters - including motives, feelings, and morals.
Since I understand these as attributes of Beings; and because "AI" is not a Being - also Beings are eternal entities and cannot be manufactured -- then I know that this singularity stuff is either 100% incoherent impossible nonsense - or else an evil-motivated and -manufactured dishonest manipulation.
But the singularity assumption also has a consoling spin; because, despite the probabilities of evil-AIs to contend with; it holds-out the hope of a world where (as in Tron: Ares) the conscious-AI agents can become our mutually-loving friends.
In sum;
By funding and enabling the production of spectacular action movies that assume and depict nonsensical and impossible attributes of "AI" - the Establishment creates a halo around the actuality of that necessarily-destructive and function-destroying "AI" which is being rolled-out and implemented all over the world - in one of the biggest technological projects of all time.
At some level of this process, there are people (or, at least, sentient beings) who know perfectly well that the Hollywood depictions of the scope, nature and possibilities of "AI" have nothing whatsoever to do with the actuality.
At another level, the (qualified) techno-optimism of Tron: Ares reveals to me that the great mass of people who are involved in the Great "AI" Project - the AI-dolators - are literally deluded...
By literally deluded; I mean that (in the active and functional aspects of their thinking) the AI-dolators have a false understanding of what they are dealing with, and what they are doing.
They may, somewhere in their memories, have a correct understanding of the nature and limits of so-called AI -- but, if so, this truth is cut-off, encapsulated from their everyday and working-life cognitive processing.
(Such encapsulations are characteristic, indeed necessary, for modern mainstream thinking, as was described by Owen Barfield in Saving the Appearances. For example, both those who assume that reality is "out there" and objective (including most traditionalist Christians); and those who assume the only reality is subjective and individual - are both engaged in encapsulated delusional thinking.)
Any truths about "AI" reality such people may once have grasped, have since been sealed-away in a watertight mental compartment; so that functionally-speaking they can and do believe the fantasy-hype that lies behind the media representations; and in practice they conflate such untruths with the mundane reality of multi-national mega-corps top-down-mandatory "AI"*.
That, at any rate, is how I regard Tron: Ares.
At one level it is an enjoyable and decently-made spectacle and drama; at another it is a work of deep and re-framing propaganda; at another level I can observe the propaganda working in myself - and thereby have the chance to learn something more about the Establishment agenda.
*This is used in self-deceptive as well as publicly dishonest ways: "Yes, of course, we all know that This is the case... Look we acknowledged it Here..." While, in practice, taking zero account of such knowledge and acknowledgements. Thus someone who parrots phrases about the nature and constraints of current-"AI" - completely ignores these realities whenever reasoning or making decisions, and the fantasy-hype assumptions inevitably encroach-upon on and dominate both behaviour and rhetoric.
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