Scarlett Johansson plays the Major, a cyber-enhanced soldier, in "Ghost in the Shell,"
hitting theaters on March 31, 2017.
Credit: Paramount Pictures and Dreamworks Pictures
Watch enough science fiction movies and you'll probably come to the conclusion that humans are living on borrowed time. Whether it's HAL 9000's murderous meltdown in 2001: A Space Odyssey or Skynet's sadistic self-preservation tactics in the Terminator franchise, artificial intelligence usually comes off as a well-intentioned attempt to serve humanity that—through some overlooked technical flaw—ends up trying to extinguish it.
The latest dystopian prophecy arrives Friday with the release of Ghost in the Shell, one of a few major releases this year to feature AI prominently in its plot. The film—based on the 1995 anime movie and Kodansha Comics manga series of the same name—tells the story of a special ops human–cyborg hybrid known as the Major (Scarlett Johansson). She leads an elite crime-fighting task force whose main mission is to protect a company that makes AI robots. Ghost depicts a technologically advanced society in which a person's brain—including the Major's—is susceptible to hacking, and one's consciousness can be copied into a new body. Over time the Major begins to question whether her memories are real or were implanted by someone else.
Hollywood's vision of AI is often entertaining, generally pessimistic and rarely realistic. With that in mind, Scientific American asked several prominent real-world AI researchers which movies, if any, have come closest to hitting the mark over the years. https://www.livescience.com/58478-did-ghost-in-the-shell-get-ai-right.html
