The feature-length documentary, “Ghost in the Machine,” spotlights the dangers of unchecked artificial intelligence (AI), but, barring its critique of AI’s transhumanism, misdiagnoses the impulses behind AI’s relentless advance.
Here’s what the film does well. It exposes the sweeping powers AI’s most irreverent advocates (popularly called Big Tech) are arrogating to themselves. It unmasks them as transhumanists, wanting AI hastened, not slowed. It vindicates skeptics, warning that AI expansionism represents unprecedented, possibly existential, threats to humanity.
In eight acts that she calls chapters, screenwriter-director Valerie Veatch questions the supposed effective altruism of the likes of DeepMind, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta. Her more credible interviewees include Techworker Community Africa’s (TCA) Mophat Okinyi and Richard Mathenge, who support Africa’s vulnerable data-workers serving global AI.
‘Not AI’
Veatch uses a “Not AI” disclaimer to flag factual footage, warning that it will become increasingly impossible to separate what’s substantiated from what’s simulated.
The film’s title derives from debates over the mind-soul and body distinction. Philosopher René Descartes’s Cartesian dualism favored distinction. But philosopher Gilbert Ryle countered that this would make the mind a mere “ghost in the machine,” helpless to animate the body. Big Tech leaders took Ryle to heart.
Superlative machine capabilities have long been the stuff of science, not just sci-fi. Yet, the boast of AI has always been about dwarfing human intelligence, not just matching it.
AI firm Anthropic may be deceptively named; it’s a play on words that implies it is pro-humanity. Still, you can’t shake the sense that Big Tech’s leaders are sociopathic if not outright misanthropic. If they’re warning so noisily about unchecked AI, why are they so unrelenting in pursuing AGI (artificial general intelligence) or ASI (artificial superintelligence)?
Presciently, C.S. Lewis warned against transhumanist Conditioners who’ll deliver dystopia disguised as utopia. So, society should no longer indulge Big Tech’s moral ventriloquism.
Cognitive scientist Abeba Birhane here warns not just against ascribing uniquely humanlike qualities (thinking, consciousness) to machines but also against defining human cognition “in machinic terms.”
She’s right. We shouldn’t liken human brains to machines. Machines are invented from created matter; brains, like everything human, are created from nothingness.
Lethal Leap
AI may be as benign as prior leaps in technology. But AGI and ASI will be more lethal than any preceding leap, dehumanizing and dividing the world irrevocably.
Lewis was right. The mindless race toward all things superhuman makes us subhuman, not more human.
Open AI’s Sam Altman comes off looking the least trustworthy among Big Tech leaders. Consider his responses when pressed on the stakes. What will he do if granted unlimited computing power, currently a pipedream? He’ll make AI build better models, then ask them what to do with that power. How will he generate the spectacular returns shareholders expect after investing so heavily, so blindly? Once AGI’s built, he’ll ask for its advice. How to separate real from unreal? He wonders if that’ll matter beyond a point.
Big Tech’s leaders are adultlike in testing the limits of what they can do, but adolescent in asking, at decisive points, whether they should. It’s humans who will be paying the price.
Chapter 6 reveals data theft and exploitation in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Chapter 7 flags the alarming pace of water- and energy-guzzling hyperscale data centers, most of them in America. It’s worrying that governments and militaries seem too in thrall of AI’s power. In their anxiety to wield it for themselves, they’re indulging Big Tech with excessive leverage over financial, human, and environmental resources.
They aren’t adequately policing the development of town-sized data centers, the exploitation of the poor or jobless, and data-harvesting that’s neither transparent nor benign.
Safety
An incestuous loop precludes “AI safety” researchers from challenging unchecked AI. Funded by Big Tech, even those meant to prevent AGI or ASI from going rogue are likely to feed the AI boom, not starve it.
For all its warnings, the film strikes a hopeful note. Humans have agency. We’re not helpless or hopeless. If we’ve erred, we can retrieve control of the direction and pace of AI advancement so that it serves humanity, not the other way around. Big Tech’s leaders are welcome to refine human learning, especially where speed and scale can make a difference, that is, in solving elusive problems in science, education, and health.
But they should keep asking the right human questions: Does this do more harm? Can we pre-empt harm instead of hunting for cures after the fact?
Part 2 explains how this documentary misdiagnoses most of the impulses behind unchecked AI.
You can watch “Ghost in the Machine” on Kanopy and Prime Video.
‘Ghost in the Machine’
Documentary
Director: Valerie Veatch
Running Time: 1 hour, 50 minutes
Release Date: Sept. 14, 2026
Rated: 3 stars out of 5
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