More Human Than Human makes the state of AI look ironically grim
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...