More Human Than Human comes along at a time when perhaps no reminder is necessary: leaving life to bots--whether that means machine learning, artificial intelligence, genuine human-like androids, etc.--might get messy for us humans. Westworld gives us one version of a sentient-machine uprising every Sunday, and news cycles like those involving Cambridge Analytica and Facebook provide gentler reminders that creating increasingly intelligent tech platforms can lead to unwanted manipulation and consequences right now. But the new documentary (which debuted at South by Southwest and plays at the acclaimed Hot Docs Festival in Toronto this week) doesn't set out to paint a picture of some futuristic hellscape. Instead, it wants viewers to pause for a second to consider the forever promise of technology. "We grew up in the shadow of the space program, really believing that tech was going to make our lives better," co-director Tommy Pallotta told Ars. "For five decades, we've seen this promise that tech would create more leisure time for us [and] that it'll make all our lives better. It's kind of insane we're still sold the same promise, but what do we really have to show for it?"

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2018 SXSW Interactive Festival. For the documentary More Human Than Human, which premiered at SXSW 2018, directors Tommy Pallotta and Femke Wolting started with a hooky premise: to explore the current state of artificial intelligence, Pallotta (producer of Richard Linklater's Waking Life) was going to try to replace himself with a robot. The directors set a robotics lab to work on the project, building a "camerabot" that was meant to scan faces, recognize emotions, train its camera on its subjects, generate questions, and interview them. As the dev team works on that project, Pallotta -- a frequent onscreen presence, as interviewer and the intended final interviewee -- fills the time by talking to other programmers, roboticists, and futurists about their AI projects or research, trying to build a sense of the state of AI art.