“The common thread between all the characters,” says Kaufman, “is that they’re in possession of tomorrow’s technology, but they’re stuck in the systems of today.” Still, Unnatural Selection works very well indeed as a chronicle of the ambitions and struggles of scientists, doctors, patients, conservationists and biohackers as they seek to seize control of evolution. One minute we are talking to Kevin Esvelt, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who wants to immunise the mice that infect ticks with Lyme disease the next we are trying to wrap our heads around the twisted logic by which David Ishee, a Mississippi dog breeder, hopes to create green fluorescent mastiff puppies by adding green fluorescent protein-expressing E. Without a narrator to guide us, we slide back and forth between CRISPR, gene editing, gene drives, gene therapy and genetic engineering as though they were all aspects of the same hard-to-grasp idea. The Social Dilemma shows us, in painful detail, how they do it. At the moment, the only way social media platforms can make money is to change what we do, how we think and who we are to fit a client’s specifications. There is no denying that an urgent injection of humanity is needed in this sector. Sure enough, one of the film’s main subjects is TED darling Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google who later co-founded the Center for Humane Technology. Yet the part of Ben, handsomely written and performed, brings real moral urgency to a documentary that might otherwise have tipped into familiar “corporate confession” territory – memorably defined by tech policy expert Maria Farrell as “I was lost but now I’m found, please come to my TED Talk”. Kartheiser, as usual, chews up the screen. Mad M en‘s Vincent Kartheiser plays an AI controlling what is implied to be Facebook – recommending ever more extreme political videos and finally even gun advertisements to lonely teen Ben (Skyler Gisondo). Whether the dramatic sequences entertain or irritate you will probably come down to your familiarity with the material.
The Social Dilemma combines shockingly candid interviews with Silicon Valley insiders with the dramatised misadventures of a social media-addicted family. Orlowski, who has received Emmy awards for his ecological outings Chasing Ice and Chasing Coral, won the Impact Film Award at the Boulder International Film Festival and picked up an honourable mention at the Copenhagen International Documentary Festival for his latest work. Though it is unlikely to tell regular readers of New Scientist anything they didn’t know already, Jeff Orlowski’s docudrama is a superb piece of civic education, exploring the accidents, mistakes, good intentions and bad behaviours (both human and algorithmic) that have shaped our leading social media platforms.
The Social Dilemma/Netflix The Social Dilemma (2020)
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