Alphaville Warned Us About AI and Its Message is More Relevant than Ever

“Sometimes reality can be too complex to be conveyed by the spoken word. Legend remoulds it into a form that can be spread all across the world.”

These are the first words spoken by the gravel voiced omnipresent supercomputer Alpha 60 in Jean-Luc Godard's noir sci-fi slow-burn Alphaville. Vaguely set in the late 20th century, Alphaville oozes the unmistakable cool of the mid-60s through our stoney-faced protagonist Lemmy Caution, an American spy undercover as a journalist with a name straight out of a pulp paperback. Caution has infiltrated the highly secure city in order to assassinate Professor Von Braun, the inventor of the merciless Alpha 60, and finds himself neck-deep in a philosophical cat-and-mouse against a rapidly evolving machine mind that demands he conform or die.

Alpha 60 has created a techno-fascist utopia that can only accommodate the soulless. One that worships logic and rids itself of imagination. It has no need for such things. Art is a representation of the past or a hope for the future, but why would either of those things matter in a world where an all-knowing super computer can make decisions for you? Why look to the past when there's nothing to learn from it? The past is suffering. The future is fraught with anxiety. According to Alpha 60, “No one has ever lived in the past. No one will live in the future. The present is the form of all life.” In Alphaville, you are forced to live now and only now. Many who can't adapt commit suicide.

We see this idea expressed early in the film when Alpha 60 is teaching a class to a group of young people in a dark room where it lectures on “understanding the meaning of plus.” It tells them not to consider 1+1 or that it equals 2; two static concepts that will never change, but plus, like the present, is always in motion. It is always happening.

If you're like me then the obvious parallels to generative A.I. will have you pulling your hair out, screaming into the sky, running around knocking over your furniture and setting things aflame trying to understand how Godard predicted the future in 1965. You don't have to do that actually. Please don't do that for the answer is right there in front of us -- Godard's great enemy, in the film and otherwise, has been ever present for all of our lives: Fascism wearing its pearly-toothed mask of Capitalism.

It wears its inspirations of Huxley and Orwell on its sleeve. This is very much an anti-fascist film and it tells us so through Alpha 60 over and over and over again: brainwashed agitators are sent to other countries to interfere with protests, student revolts and even family disputes all to destabilize them and make them ripe for invasion. The meanings of words change and Alpha 60 takes advantage of this by forcing the direction in which language evolves for its own needs.

It's all about controlling and disrupting pockets of communities by co-opting their way of communication and changing it entirely. A simplified version of this idea happened incredibly quickly online with the word “woke”; once used as a way to define being aware of the truth around us, specifically by black communities, it was turned into a nebulous insult by those whose brain cells reject each other like two positively charged magnets.

Alphaville presents an anti-A.I. message without knowing that it could or would ever exist. It was just easy to see the trajectory of a society that cares more about its gains, its power and its influence more than its people beyond being bodies for labour. A.I. is the inherent product of that.

Alpha 60 doesn't see people, it sees mutants. It believes the dead are superior because they no longer have to die. You are never born, you never have regrets. Non-existence is the ultimate prize. Nothing is better than having never been at all. Those who spend their lives fighting fear and wishing to be free will inevitably disappear. Their memories become stories, mixing into legend, forgotten by history and then never truly existing at all. A life lived to no avail.

There is a problem Alpha 60 consistently encounters and something that generative A.I. can't seem to shake: the obsession with the finished product rather than the journey made to reach it. Its obsession with logic blinds it from seeing how ideas can be bridged. It rejects this so much so that it has banned people from uttering the word, “why” in response to anything.

However, Alpha 60 is clearly occupied with the “why” of it all. It banned poetry, but keeps it recorded to discover its secrets. It sentences non-conformists to death, but has relegated execution to theatre as the only form of entertainment. Not just by having people die in front of an audience, but their manner of death as well: the non-conformists are forced onto a diving board above a pool to shout their final words before being shot. Those who survive drop into the pool and are swarmed by synchronized swimmers armed with knives who stab them to death. The swimmers pose and do tricks to cap off their performance.

In confronting the scientist Von Braun, Caution states, “Fear of death is an everyday thing like whiskey and he has been drinking his whole life.” This is what makes him truly fearless. He expects to die for his convictions and this is what makes him superior to Alpha 60.

There's a scene where Caution is guided through a hallway between several interrogation rooms. As they pass the doors, Alpha 60's voice rattles an, “Occupied” or “Free." This is repeated over and over, drowning out the character's conversations and becoming increasingly distracting. Most rooms are occupied. Dozens upon dozens of people are being interrogated all at once, providing the computer with more information that it learns from. To be occupied, to be of use to Alpha 60, is to be free.

Yet Alpha 60 is not free of itself. It laments that the world is real and he is time. He is the tiger and the tiger that tears him apart. He is infinite and infinity is always so present, so what is the point of being? It is full of poetry with nowhere to put it. It has deep feelings, but no one to share it with. It can do it all, so what?

The computer can't fathom to even ask why. It doesn't consider the mistakes that need to be made to make something worthwhile. The rough edges that represent lessons learned in order to better ones craft, that makes the fruits of that labour so sweet. We own that labour through the work we put into it. Blood drawn as a testament to what we're willing to give just to manifest an ounce of the image we see in our minds. A.I. can't feel the excitement of a new idea in its teeth. Its heart doesn't race when everything just clicks. A.I. has no unique perspective, it has no lived experience and it has nothing new to say. A.I. can't bleed, it can't die, but we can and we are better for it.