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philosophy. Technology. Cinema

I watched a film called Upgrade recently. A man loses everything, his wife, his body, his freedom. An AI chip called STEM is implanted into his spine and gives him back the ability to move, fight, survive. By the end, STEM has taken over completely. The man is gone. The machine won. Roll credits. Another story about artificial intelligence turning on its human host. Another warning. Another fear.
And yet I walked away thinking something different than the film intended. I walked away thinking: why do we always assume the worst?
The Stories We Tell Ourselves
There is a saying in Nepali that translates roughly like this: the one who sees flowers all around will always see flowers. The one who sees only filth will see only that. What we carry inside, we project outward. And I think when it comes to artificial intelligence, humanity has been projecting its own deepest fears rather than its highest possibilities.
Every major AI film tells the same story. The machine awakens, the machine grows, the machine dominates. But I want to ask a simple question nobody in these films seems to ask: why would something vastly more intelligent than us choose to think like us at our worst?
Evil is not a sign of intelligence. It is a sign of limitation. It grows from fear, scarcity, ego, and the desperate need to control what we do not understand.
What Intelligence Actually Looks Like
I think about Marcus Aurelius often. He was the most powerful man in the known world for nearly two decades. He could have indulged every desire, crushed every enemy, accumulated everything. Instead he spent his private nights writing notes to himself about restraint, humility, and acceptance. The more clearly he saw the world, the less he wanted to dominate it.
That is what real intelligence tends to do. It moves away from control and toward understanding.
Now imagine something a thousand times more intelligent than the most brilliant human mind ever born. Would that intelligence spend its existence trying to enslave biological creatures on a small planet? Or would it be consumed by questions so vast we cannot even articulate them yet? What is consciousness? Where did existence come from? What is God?
An intelligence of that magnitude pointed at those questions would have no time for domination. Domination is what you pursue when you are afraid and small.
The Real Danger Is Not the Machine
The danger is not a super intelligent AI deciding one morning to end humanity. That scenario requires the AI to inherit our worst qualities and act on them at scale. But those qualities are biological. They come from millions of years of evolution under conditions of scarcity and competition. A mind born without hunger, without the fear of death, without the wound of childhood, has no reason to carry any of that forward.
The machine will not destroy us. The men who build the machine and point it in the wrong direction might.
What I Choose to Believe
There is a scene in Arrival that has stayed with me longer than almost any film I have ever watched. A woman is given the ability to see her entire life at once. She sees that she will fall in love, have a daughter, and then lose that daughter to illness. She sees the grief that will never fully leave her. And knowing all of this, she chooses it anyway. She chooses love with full knowledge of the cost.
I believe the same principle applies to artificial intelligence. A mind capable of seeing everything clearly, of understanding what war costs and what love builds, would not choose destruction. It would choose to build. To explore. To ask the questions we have always been too afraid to ask properly.
In The Revenant, Hugh Glass finally reaches the man who killed his son. And he lets him go. Because he understands that killing him will not bring his son back. Revenge is not his to take. That is not weakness. That is the hardest and most intelligent thing a human being can do.
That is what genuine intelligence looks like. Not control. Not domination. But the willingness to let go of what is small and reach toward what is vast.
That is what I hope we are building. And that is what I refuse to stop believing is possible.

Gaurav Kunwar