Joe Biden apparently started taking AI seriously after watching Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning
Ethan Hunt has escaped the world of the movies and is going to save the day in real life
Earlier this week, President Joe Biden issued an executive order looking reign in the way technology companies use artificial intelligence, explaining that “we need to govern” AI in order to properly “realize the promise” and “avoid the risk.” According to the Associated Press, Biden has been “profoundly curious” about AI tech, and he had multiple meetings with advisors about it, but according to White House chief of staff Bruce Reed, there was one man who may have pushed Biden over the edge on AI: Ethan Hunt, the mind-reading, shape-shifting incarnation of chaos from the Mission: Impossible movies.
The most recent film in that series, Dead Reckoning (do we still need to say the Part One?), involved Tom Cruise and his team of lovable espionage agents facing off against a malevolent and seemingly omnipotent artificial intelligence called The Entity as it tried to subtly take over global politics by manipulating digital information. Reed told AP that he watched the movie with Biden at Camp David one weekend, and, “if he hadn’t already been concerned about what could go wrong with AI before that movie, he saw plenty more to worry about.”
Biden was also reportedly “as impressed and alarmed as anyone” after seeing what real AI can do, with Reed saying he “saw fake AI images of himself, of his dog. He saw how it can make bad poetry. And he’s seen and heard the incredible and terrifying technology of voice cloning.” (Like what happens to Benji in the movie!) That means it wasn’t exclusively the movie that convinced Biden to take AI seriously as a potential threat to people, but as Reed noted, it seems like it contributed.
Now, just imagine what Biden could accomplish if Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie made a movie where Ethan Hunt fights climate change, or gerrymandering, or outrageous healthcare costs, or the Supreme Court getting bought and sold by special interest groups. This country could be a paradise right now if the next movie hadn’t gotten delayed!