Art and Artificial Intelligence

In an age of conspiracies, here is a striking example, preposterous as it may sound. Highly intelligent robots--general artificial intelligence--surround us, undetected but fundamentally in charge, and human beings are just following instructions that they receive from these elusive entities. Or, a little less preposterously, imagine that the world is alive with consciousness and intelligence, and human thought reflects these processes. Does it sound like something out of The Matrix? The science fiction classic is not science fiction but a parable of something very real--namely, cinema itself. When you enter the dark room of a movie theater, a radical transformation takes place. You become the screen, and the mind that perceives, thinks, and connects ideas is fully contained in the celluloid roll, or the digital file. In a movie, everything has already been perceived in exactly the sequence that it is intended to be perceived; in the dark room, those images leave the hidden mind of the celluloid and get projected onto your mind--they get force-fed into your mind and the minds of the other viewers, where the images and ideas properly unfold.