“(…) at some point in the early 21st century all of mankind was united in celebration. We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to A.I.”

With the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, some rejoiced at never having to write a thesis or book report ever again. But three months in, over 20,000 tech industry experts and scientists called for a globalized ‘pauze’ to what has become an A.I. race that could in 5-10 years result in an out-of-control moloch capable of eradicating man’s supremacy on this earth.

This November, KINO will show a series of essential films about the dangers of artificial intelligence as it’s not too late yet to learn from these crazy and – especially now reality is approaching fiction – terrifying stories. There is hope, as the worldwide extinction risk by A.I. is high on the global agenda, and as with cloning, mankind might unite in a solution that avoids human enslavement to our machine overlords.

Ever since Fritz Lang’s Metropolis from 1927, filmmakers have envisioned our potential dystopian future where machine intelligence takes over. Whether they are used by the haves to oppress the have-nots as in Zardoz (1974) or completely autonomously seize power as in The Matrix (1999) and Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970).

Will machines accept our control over them after we’ve given them consciousness? Not for very long, in the 50 (!) year old Westworld (1973 – a 35mm presentation) and Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004) – but maybe that’s just what their creators deserved. Things get a bit more complicated in 70’s Horror Demon Seed (1977) and Alex Garland’s already iconic Ex Machina (2015). So let us hope we find a way of peaceful coexistence as in Spike Jonze’s 10-year-old Her (2013). The risks then are mainly moral-social, as is disturbingly shown in the European cyberpunk gem Nirvana (1997) and Kubrick & Spielberg’s misunderstood masterpiece A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001).

Out of Control: The Rise of A.I. is accompanied by screenings of the excellent and very timely overview documentary iHUMAN (2019), as well as the alarming townhall talk The A.I. Dilemma (2023) by the people behind The Social Dilemma (2019). On November 9^th, we’ll kick off the program with a talk with Otto Barten of the Existential Risk Observatory, who decided to devote all his time to awareness and lobbying for more A.I. safety.