Some criticisms:
And by artificial intelligence, read of course (non-human-identical) artificial general intelligence.
Today-2022, this is placed under the science fiction film category. But maybe this might change during Ciro Santilli's own lifetime?
The basic criteria of "is a film about artificial intelligence good or not" to Ciro Santilli is: does the AI inhabit humanoid, or fully human looking, bodies? Bodies is a bad sign due to:
  • the best science fiction works deeply explore the consequences of one single technology: efficient humanoid bodies are a second technological breakthrough besides AI itself. The first AI will obviously be a supercomputer without a body
  • it is hard to imagine that the AI wouldn't organize itself as one huge central computer and R&D/command center. Perhaps there will be need for a few separate ones to optimize usage of natural resources, and to have some redundance in case a nuke blows the region, but there would be very very few of the think tanks. But having big centers is fundamental, because you centralize all the flow of ideas and their combination leading to new better outcomes for the AI. The mobile robot actors controlled by this center, if any exist, would then be slaves with some degree of autonomy and infinitely less computational powerful than the think tank.
This is a tag for films that depict some sort of artificial general intelligence, but in which that is not the primary focus of the film.
Things that can be understood are boring.
Aaron Swartz agrees: www.aaronsw.com/weblog/looperexplained "Next week we'll explain Primer." He never did though :'-(
That makes Ciro Santilli most mad about this film is the fact that the dude was passionate about writing, and when he became a genius, rather than write the best novels ever written, he decided instead to play the stock market instead. This paints an accurate picture of 2020's society, where finance jobs make infinitely more money than other real engineering jobs, and end up attracting much of the talent.
Another enraging thing is how his girlfriend starts liking him again once he is a genius, and instead of telling her to fuck off, he stays with her.
The other really bad thing is the ending. He fixed the drug by himself? He scared off De Niro just like that?
Ciro Santilli just keep watching that a gazillion times whenever it showed on TV.
All action scenes are useless crap, but the premise with Ciro's precious simulation hypothesis subject, related physics and the illusion of life.
It is a shame that the key premise of using human bodies to produce energy is completely and impossibly stupid. You would obviously get more energy by directing burning the food you feed into humans.
If the film had been made later, maybe the much more plausible concept of AI alignment would would have been used instead. What a shame.
Video 1. Blue Pill or Red Pill scene from The Matrix (1999). Source.
The premise that "we can't make AGI, but we know enough about the human brain to upload on to a computer" is flawed. Edit: after reading Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom (2014), Ciro Santilli was convinced otherwise. What is flawed is of course just the "extracting connectome with macroscopic probes part". A post mortem connectome extraction with microtome is much more believable. But of course they weren't going to show fake slices of Jonny Depp's brain, are they? Famous actor bodies are sacred! What a huge lost opportunity. On the other hand however, the scale of the first connectome extraction would be arguably too huge to be undertaken by a random pair of rogue researchers. The same would also likely apply to any first time human brain connectome. It would much more likely be a huge public effort, much like the Human Genome Project.
But this film does have the merit of exploring how an AGI might act to take over the AGI might act to take over the world once created, notably by creating its own physical research laboratory. Though it doesn't feel likely that it could go under the radar for 2 years given the energetic requirements of the research. Even the terrorists find it before the FBI!
I also wish they had shown the dildo (or more likely, direct stimulation!) computerized Jonny Depp used to use with his wife before he managed to re-synthesized his body. But you know, 18+ would cut too much profits. Ah, what a shame.
Video 1. Can You Prove You're Self Aware? in the big lab scene from Transcendence (2014). Source.