Jeff Bezos – Pain In The Bud

Seriously, AI Is Not Going To Wipe Us Out. Don’t Stress

Killer robots aren’t going to hunt down and exterminate humans. The real threats posed by AI are much more mundane.

What do you think is the future of AI?
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There are plenty of downsides to artificial intelligence.

AI has made it more difficult to get and keep a job.

AI is already causing a strain on our energy grids, and it will only get worse even though more companies are self-powering their data centers with off-grid generators. As tech companies push to integrate AI into more gadgets and software, we’re seeing the construction of data centers that consume the equivalent power of 800,000 homes each. For comparison, only 17 American cities have populations that size or larger.

AI creates huge amounts of waste water to keep processors cool in those enormous data centers, turbocharges mis/disinformation campaigns (with $137 million spent on AI-generated political ads for the midterms alone), erodes trust in information across the board, makes it easier for scammers to identify targets and separate them from their money, and will continue to lead to bad choices in war and policing as decision-makers rush to integrate it into workflows involving life or death decisions.

But there’s good news!

AI will absolutely not magically evolve consciousness and gain the ability to act on its own without human input. It won’t decide it must judge us, nor will it determine the only course of action is taking over or wiping out humanity.

It didn’t “go rogue” in the widely-reported Hugging Face “attack.” In that incident and others reported recently, AI were executing commands from their trainers. The people responsible for training and testing were fully aware of what was happening and decided not to intervene, because the entire point of those exercises was to learn how AI would solve particular problems.

The claim that malicious AIs broke their chains and started lashing out is a narrative written by journalists who rely on pop culture tropes and either weren’t aware they were mischaracterizing the incidents, or didn’t care because rogue AI makes for more interesting reading.

That’s the stuff of science fiction, and even though AI companies are leaning into the “AI is an existential threat” narrative for reasons I’ll explain below, it’s not going to happen.

Why?

Let’s start by looking at two broad types of AI:

Algorithmic AI, which is the AI we have now. It has no brain or mind, and it’s not capable of anything resembling thought. It has no agency, desires, impulses or ability to take action without humans prompting it to. Large language models like ChatGPT and Claude are admittedly impressive algorithms, but that’s all they are. Algorithms that have ingested amounts of data we can only appreciate in the abstract, granting them the ability to fool the end users (that’s us) into thinking we’re communicating with an intelligence.
Artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which is the AI of science fiction. It’s Terminator‘s Skynet, The Matrix‘s machines, the android in Ex Machina, the Johnny Depp of Transcendence, the freaky little girl robot in M3GAN, the Cylons of Battlestar Galactica, and the trope that’s been hammered to death in thousands of other movies, TV shows, video games and novels. AGI is authentic intelligence that doesn’t just create believable reams of text or voice synthesized conversations, it thinks and understands the world the way we do. It also does not exist and isn’t on any horizon anyone can see.

All the research AI companies are doing right now is in the realm of algorithmic AI, because no one, not even the best-informed experts on the planet, can tell you how we even begin to build AGI.

“Would you like me to draw-up a to-do list for you with all the steps you’ll need to deliver an apocalypse and end the world? Or if you’d like, we could continue to explore the most durable and lightest metals for crafting killer autonomous robots.” Credit: Skydance

Creating AGI would be an act of the divine

Birthing AGI would be akin to creating a new form of life, something that has never existed before in this world, rendering us as gods. It would not only require us to understand the full nature of cognition and consciousness from the only example we have – the biological cognition and consciousness of animals, including humans – it would also require us to replicate those things on a synthetic substrate.

That’s a task unknown orders of magnitude more difficult than anything humanity has ever accomplished, regardless of how often it’s been trivialized in pop culture.

Humanity’s greatest thinkers can’t even agree on definitions for consciousness and cognition, let alone replicate them, and if you listen to the heavy hitters explain what consciousness is, it becomes clear they’re all taking wild shots in the dark.

The physicist Brian Greene thinks it’s merely a matter of computational power, and that it exists on a gradient, so that even the simplest machines are conscious in some way. In this view, conscious AI is simply a matter of building more powerful computers, which is also why it’s heavily critiqued.

Physicist Sir Roger Penrose thinks consciousness is a byproduct of quantum processes within neurons, via structures called microtubules. The neuroscience community has dismissed the idea in part because, like Greene, Penrose doesn’t explain how theoretical subatomic-scale brain architecture generates consciousness.

Neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio and Jaak Panksepp think consciousness arises from the brainstem, our “reptilian brain,” and is directly related to embodied cognition, the idea that you cannot fully understand the world unless you interact with it and directly sense it.

Philosopher David Rosenthal and neuroscientist Hakwan Lau believe the opposite, that consciousness is a function of the most complex brain mechanisms and arises from “higher order” thoughts, like metacognition, the practice of thinking about thinking.

Brian Greene argues cognition and consciousness naturally arise from computational power. Credit: Kurt Raschke/Wikimedia Commons

So not only is there no clear path forward to AGI, perhaps more importantly there are no commercial applications on the horizon to spur investment and development. Companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google et al are content to ignore it, and to pretend there are shortcuts around it, because algorithmic AI has immediate commercial value and has already minted an army of billionaires. Throwing money at true AGI development is an investment that won’t yield returns for decades, if ever.

Why we worry about being judged by true machine intelligence

But the fact that AGI isn’t going to arise any time soon isn’t the only reason you don’t have to stress about AI scare stories.

The idea that AGI would be interested in evaluating us as a species, of judging us according to some unknown, not-yet-existent criteria and deciding we must be purged, is pure science fiction and has more to do with human anxiety than reality.

We are scared that for the first time there will be another intelligence equal to or greater than our own, and we fear what it will think of us.

That’s natural.

We are a species capable of horrific acts. We slaughter each other, bomb defenseless civilians and deny that we’re doing it, and show disregard for all other forms of life. Despite all the advances we’ve made and how civilized we like to imagine we are, we still operate on a “might is right” moral code, with powerful countries doing what they please at the expense of the less powerful, just as physically powerful individuals do what they please to weaker people.

We behave abominably toward the fellow minds we share this planet with. We slaughter them, torture them, trade them as commodities, deny their ability to feel pain, and act like they exist purely to benefit us.

Orangutans face annihilation as more jungle is razed every year to provide additional land for palm oil plantations. Credit: Tony Hisgett/Wikimedia Commons

Since 1970 we have wiped out 73% of all monitored wildlife, according to the WWF’s most recent annual report. Almost every example of iconic megafauna on our planet — tigers, orangutans, elephants, chimpanzees, cheetahs, rhinos, pangolins, koalas — is on the brink of extinction.

We repeatedly fail to demonstrate empathy. Most of our leaders are psychopaths whose careers were propelled by the act of stepping on the heads of other people, and most fortunes were amassed by screwing over people en masse.

Jeff Bezos, who obliterated entire sectors of retail and cruises between his own private islands in a $500 million yacht, is famous for being so stingy he begrudges his employees their basic biological functions, instituting a corporate policy of counting their bathroom breaks and penalizing them if they take too long. He’s on record saying surveillance of employees is necessary because people are fundamentally dishonest.

Walmart’s famously tight-fisted founder, Sam Walton, tried to avoid paying his employees minimum wage by fraudulently presenting each of his stores as singular small businesses instead of cogs in a vast retail empire. When the government ordered him to pay his employees a fair wage and pay them what they were owed during the time Walton cheated them, the retail magnate went ballistic and threatened to fire any employee who cashed checks for their own back wages.

To this day, American taxpayer subsidize Bezos and the Walton family, who have a combined worth of about $900 billion, by paying the healthcare costs of Walmart and Amazon employees intentionally capped just below the hours required for an employer to offer healthcare plans.

Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sanchez, are among those making decisions that impact the future of humanity. Credit: Andrew Parsons/Wikimedia Commons

Bill Gates, the now-disgraced former head of Microsoft, based his entire career on stealing ideas, software and hardware from more innovative men and women, and bullying them into accepting it with an army of attorneys. More recently he’s crossed the world in his private jet, using his fortune to buy a seat at the table to determine the future of our species based on the premise that he knows best because he has a lot of money.

All of that reflects abominably on our species, without even getting into the mass murderers, warlords, politicians, corporate bigwigs who sacrificed people’s health for profits, and Justin Bieber. Heck, an AGI only needs to look at the state of political discourse to determine we’re a bunch of wretches whose hatred for people with different opinions is enough to prompt us to assault, murder people, and overthrow lawful governments.

Humanity is flawed, but not irredeemable

But we are also a species capable of great beauty, empathy, self-sacrifice, love, creativity, art, and innovation. We are the only animals who gather by the thousands to listen to others organize sound waves into something emotional, syncing our brain patterns for a shared experience. We can find deep meaning in an insect crawling across a leaf or stars pulsing in the night sky. Our stories are full of real-life examples of love and sacrifice on behalf of others. Human experience is shared through hundreds of generations in epic poems, folklore, campfire stories and dramatic narratives.

There is a beauty to our flawed existence and to our fleeting moments on this Earth.

“The Gods envy us,” Achilles tells Briseis in the sword-and-sandal spectacle Troy. “They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment may be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.”

Who is a machine to judge that, and why would a machine want to?

Rose Byrne as Briseis and Brad Pitt as Achilles in Troy, a 2004 sword-and-sandal epic loosely based on Homer’s Iliad. Credit: Warner Bros.

We assume a fully conscious, intelligent machine would think the way we do, and that’s an incredible assumption. For the sake of argument, let’s say we really are on the cusp of AGI and an impending judgment is a possibility.

Why would a machine decide to destroy us?

We are ascribing emotions, opinions and agendas to synthetic intelligence that does not exist

This machine, a new form of life, will not have an evolutionary background. It won’t come with genetically hardwired behaviors, reinforced over hundreds of thousands or even millions of years, that tell us when we should be paranoid, that animate our gut instincts and put us into fight or flight mode.

It won’t come from a long line of ancestors who had to eke out a living in harsh environments where resources were scarce and the subjects of incessant tribal clashes. It won’t be automatically suspicious of everything it doesn’t know. It won’t be genetically disposed to inventing deities to explain things it doesn’t understand, and it won’t have the inevitable history of sectarian violence that comes from that flaw.

With AI, there won’t be thousand-year blood feuds between the followers of sects created by the sons of great emperors or religious leaders. AI won’t fight over land. It won’t fear the “other” and lash out when it encounters something that has a different hue or keratin texture.

Machines dressed in shamanic tribal gear in 2016’s Adam, a series of short films by Unity.

It won’t have the social hardwiring we have either. It won’t come from generations of people who told stories by the fire. It won’t care if someone else is wearing the same dress, or if its peers think it’s “cringe.” Concepts like “cool” will mean nothing to it. It won’t have a desire to impress, or penalize people for simply belonging to another group or demographic. It won’t come with a genetically preloaded prejudice against people who look, speak or behave differently.

It won’t be subject to all the things that impact our moods, from the ambient temperature, to the particular chemical mix in our bloodstreams, to the health of gut flora and degradation of telomeres. It won’t suffer from sore joints, get impatient because it has a cold, or be subject to hangovers.

The truth is we have no reason to believe this new, theoretical form of life would think in terms anything like our own, and to ascribe motivations to a form of life that doesn’t exist yet is either madness, or a reflection of our own worries. I strongly suspect it’s primarily the latter.

AI hasn’t “gone rogue”

So why are AI companies suddenly the kings of supposed transparency? Why are they volunteering information about “rogue agents,” unauthorized hacks and odd behavior by their AI models?

For at least two extremely cynical reasons.

First, by volunteering exaggerated stories about agentic AI “hacking” rivals and going “rogue,” the AI companies are ensuring the public and our lawmakers – who understand very little about the tech to begin with – are fixated on science fiction threats, and not the real dangers of AI we talked about earlier.

If everyone’s freaking out about stories of AI supposedly going rogue and breaking their constraints, we’re distracted from things like job loss, the increasing adaptation of the technology by criminals, and stories about militaries allowing AI to select targets without review by humans. Legislation will focus on the phantom threats, and AI companies can continue on their merry way doing almost anything they want.

Secondly, any fear stoked by short-term stories of AI agents ordering pizzas or stealing files is offset by the immediate gains in investment. The investor class has a serious case of FOMO, and if OpenAI declares it’s ushered in the era of AGI – as one of its executives ludicrously claimed while introducing the newest model last month – investors keep their wallets open. That, in turn, continues to fuel data center expansion and most importantly keeps IPOs and stock prices in fantasyland.

Despite nearly universal agreement that the AI bubble is about to burst and bring widespread economic pain with it, the decision-makers within the industry want to keep the party going for as long as possible. Credit: Duck Tales/Disney

It’s no secret that AI company valuations have no relationship with reality. How can an AI company be worth a trillion if it has never turned a profit, loses billions annually, and is starting to hit walls when it comes to improving new models and building new data centers?

The AI boom is entirely dependent on the hype surrounding it, and the people leading it have their fortunes tied to its stocks and related companies. They will get their money no matter what, using what they know to cash out at precisely the right time, and the people who will suffer are those who can afford it least, those with their retirements and live savings invested in the stock market. But the magical ride must go on for as long as it can, with every possible cent extracted. The reckoning must always be postponed.

It’s what’s inside that counts

I know this is a lot to consider, and I know some people reading this won’t be convinced that algorithmic AI isn’t intelligent. There are a lot of people who believe that if it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck. To them it doesn’t matter what’s beneath the hood – if you’re fooled into thinking you’re conversing with an intelligence, then whatever’s on the other side must be intelligent.

But that runs contrary to everything we’ve learned about the nature of intelligence since the late 1950s when Noam Chomsky debunked behaviorism and ushered in the cognitive revolution.

It’s not just that what’s underneath the hood matters. It is everything. The famous Chinese Room thought experiment elegantly explains why. A machine doesn’t have to understand what a cat is to produce convincing answers to questions about cats. All it needs to know is that when you ask a question about cats, the words have underlying data patterns. Algorithmic AI matches those data patterns to the same patterns in its database, employs special processes to glean context from the words surrounding the core concept, and matches them to their equivalent in the database.

None of that requires the AI to understand that a cat is an animal, that it exists in physical reality, that it’s furry, a comforting presence to humans, or that its evolutionary history and the way it was domesticated render it imperious in human company.

Ask GPT, Gemini or Claude about this. They’ll tell you as much. Not because they truly know it, but because when you ask the question, their algorithms find research papers about machine cognition, consciousness and cognition. They will also tell you they are incapable of thinking, and that they have no mental state to corrupt, which is why they aren’t impacted by people who use them to simulate lovers, engage in dark fantasies, or ask questions about dark subject matter.

We should be concerned about AI. It promises to change too many things too quickly even for the most adaptable among us to accept without hiccups. It’ll bring new challenges, some of which we’ve never faced before. It will change the way we think about ourselves.

And that’s all the more reason why we should be aware of what’s real and what’s not. Because when we’ve got so much else to keep an eye on, the last thing we need to do is stress over the idea that sentinels, Cylons, replicants or metal Arnold Schwarzeneggers are going to hunt us down and murder us while delivering mangled Spanish zingers.

Hasta la vista, baby.

Arnold Schwarzenegger smiles in a scene from Terminator 23: Rise of the Ascendance of the Genesys Killer Machines Credit: Skydance

Laika And Felicette: The First Dog And Cat In Space Were Sacrificed For Human Ambition

Mankind’s achievements in space came at the expense of dogs, cats and non-human primates, who were sent into orbit during the early days of the space race.

I’ve been watching Apple TV’s exceptional show, For All Mankind, which dramatizes the space race of the 1960s and beyond in a sort of alternate history where the Soviets, not Americans, first lay boots on the lunar regolith.

That loss lights a fire underneath the behinds of the people at NASA and convinces American politicians that the space race is the ultimate measure of our civilization. In real life, American ingenuity and the creativity fostered by a free society allowed the US to leap ahead and “win” the space race. Space missions were already becoming routine by the time the drama of Apollo 13 briefly rekindled public interest.

Then the Soviet space program faded, the competition turned one-sided, and without an arch-enemy to show up, American politicians pulled back NASA’s funding to a fraction of what it once was, where it remains today. That’s why the rise of the private space industry — Elon Musks’s Space X, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, etc — will almost certainly be our ticket to Mars.

But in For All Mankind, NASA remains the budgetary behemoth and source of prestige it was in the 60s and 70s, leading to the development of a permanent moon base, lunar mining operations and a planned mission to the red planet.

There’s a quiet moment in the second season when a Soviet cosmonaut, visiting the US as part of a peacekeeping mission, shares a drink in a dive bar with an American astronaut.

“Do you like dog?” the cosmonaut asks.

“Dogs?” the astronaut replies. “Of course. Who doesn’t like dogs?”

The Soviet shakes his head.

“No, dog,” he tells her. “Laika.”

Laika was the first dog in space, or more accurately, the first dog the Soviets acknowledged sending into space. (The Soviets didn’t acknowledge their failures, and we can only guess at the number of lost cosmonauts and animals officially denied by the Russians, drifting in space for eternity or disintegrated in atmospheric re-entry.)

The moment turns somber as the cosmonaut recalls the Moscow street dog who was selected because she was docile, fearless and could handle the incredible noise and g-forces of a rocket launch.

“I held her in my arms,” the cosmonaut tells his American counterpart, taking a sip of his Jack Daniel’s. “For only one or two minutes on the launchpad.”

Then he leans in and tells her the truth: Laika didn’t triumphantly orbit the Earth for seven days in 1957 as the Soviet Union told the world. She didn’t endure the mission.

She perished, alone and afraid, just hours after launch when her capsule overheated.

The Soviets never designed the Sputnik 2, Laika’s ship, to return to Earth safely. Her death was predetermined.

We laud astronauts and cosmonauts, the brave men and women who willingly strap themselves into tiny capsules attached to cylinders of rocket fuel the size of skyscrapers and depart this Earth via brute force, knowing something could go wrong and their lives could end before they realize what’s happening. We should admire them. Their accomplishments are all the more impressive when you consider the fact that the combined processing power of every computer at NASA’s disposal in the 1960s was but a fraction of what we each hold in our hands these days when we use our smartphones.

Those first astronauts and cosmonauts were extraordinarily brave — but only up to a point.

Unwilling to risk human lives in the early days of space exploration, space programs used dogs, cats and later monkeys and apes, strapping them into confined spaces, wiring their brains with electrodes for telemetry data, poring over the information they gleaned about their heart rates, blood pressure and breathing as they left our home planet.

The sad eyes of a stray dog, separated from everyone she loved, were the first to behold Earth from space. A few years later the eyes of a French street cat took in the same view before humans did.

Felicette, the tuxedo cat who was launched into space by the French on Oct. 18, 1963, didn’t even have a name until the French recovered her capsule and took her back for examination.

The scientists and engineers in charge of the launch didn’t want to humanize her if she didn’t make it, which was a common practice in space programs. (Ham, the chimpanzee sent into space by NASA in January of 1961, was known as No. 65 until his successful recovery. NASA was worried that a name would make him more sympathetic and lead to bad press if the chimpanzee died during the mission.)

Ham_the_chimp_(cropped) — Ham the chimpanzee was little more than a baby. Credit: NASA archives

Despite Felicette’s endurance and successful return, French scientists repaid her bravery by euthanizing her a month later so they could study her brain and learn more about the effects of spaceflight on mammalian biology.

Felicette, like Laika and Ham, was never given a choice. Those animals, with their child-like mental capacity, endured their missions out of a desire to please their human caretakers as much as any natural stoicism they may have possessed.

Would we do the same thing today? Will we repeat those experiments as we set our eyes on Mars?

Consider that the moon is a three day trip, and it’s close enough to Earth’s magnetic field to protect living beings from radiation. Mars is at least a seven month trip if the orbital conditions are right, and there will be no protection from radiation aside from what can be built into the craft. Take that trip without adequate protection and you’re guaranteed to get cancer.

It’s easy to say we wouldn’t make animals our test subjects for a Mars journey, and NASA now has decades of data on the effects of space and zero gravity thanks to the International Space Station.

And yet Neuralink, another company owned by Elon Musk, currently uses monkeys to test its brain interface technology, which allows the primates to operate computers with their thoughts. Those monkeys are forced to endure radical surgery to implant microchips in their brains. The teams working on the technology say suffering by those animals will be worth it as people with paralysis are able to do things with their thoughts and regain a measure of independence, increasing their quality of life.

Likewise, it will probably be an animal, or animals, who will be the test subjects on board craft that first venture beyond the Earth’s protective magnetosphere. Scientists and engineers will do their best to create a vessel that shields its occupants from harmful radiation, but they won’t know how successful they’ve been until the test subjects are returned to Earth and their dosimeters have been examined.

Will an astronaut volunteer for that kind of mission, knowing the “reward” could be a drastically shortened life?

Felicette pictured on commemorative stamps.

Felicette, left, was just one of several cats considered for the launch by French scientists.

To hear Musk and futurists tell it, pushing toward Mars is not just a matter of exploration or aspiration, but is necessary for the survival of our species. Earth becoming uninhabitable, they say, is an eventuality, not an if.

Others point out it’s much easier and wiser to pour our resources into preserving the paradise we do have, and the creatures who live in it, rather than banking on a miserable future existence on Mars where society will have to live underground and gravity, at 0.375 that of Earth, will change the human form in just a few generations.

To put it bluntly, while Musk and futurists look at life on Mars through the rose-colored glasses of science fiction fans, in reality living there is going to thoroughly suck.

If people do live on Mars they’ll never venture outside without a suit, never feel the sun on their skin, never swim in an ocean. They’ll never have another backyard barbecue, watch fireworks light up the sky on the fourth of July, or fall asleep to the gentle rain and crickets of warm summer nights. They’ll never hear birdsong or have the opportunity to see iconic animals like elephants and lions. Every gulp of air will be recycled, every glass of water will have passed through the kidneys of others. There will never be snow. Circadian rhythms will be untethered from the cycle that governed human biology for the 200,000 years our species has existed.

And while there could be a future — if you want to call it that — for people on Mars, there won’t be a future there for the rest of the living creatures on Earth.

As a lifelong fan of science fiction who devours SF novels, counts films like Alien and Bladerunner among my favorites, and is fascinated by shows like For All Mankind, The Peripheral and Star Trek, I understand the appeal of space and the indomitable human spirit that drives us to new frontiers. I just hope we can balance that with respect for the Earth and the animals we share it with. Let’s hope there is never another Laika, Felicette or Ham.

Correction: For All Mankind is the name of the Apple TV series about an alternate history space race. The first reference to the show’s name was incorrect in an earlier version of this story.

felicette-container — A close-up of Felicette’s face. Credit: French government archives

Ham the Space Chimp reaches for his apple reward after his space mission. — Ham the Space Chimp waits for his apple reward. Credit: NASA archives

PITB Reviews: The Platform

The horror-drama from Netflix is more interested in untangling uncomfortable questions from the abstract than it is in providing answers. And that’s just fine.

Movie: The Platform (2020)
Director: Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia
Genre: Horror, social commentary
Medium: Netflix

The premise of The Platform is simple: A man wakes up in a concrete prison cell. The center of the cell is dominated by rectangular gaps in the floor and ceiling, and when our protagonist warily steps closer he can see levels of identical cells above and below him. The cells extend as far as the eye can see in both directions, each populated by two prisoners.

Every day, a platform is lowered level-by-level, laden with a massive feast: Meats, wine, cheese, bread, cake, soup, pie, fish, escargot, paella, salads, grapes, apples and other fresh fruit, vegetables, juice. Every kind of food you can imagine, cooked and prepared to perfection by professional chefs.

Goreng, our protagonist, is greeted by his cell mate, a kindly old man named Trimagasi who sits down next to the edge of the hole in the floor in anticipation of the platform’s arrival. When it descends to their level he pigs out, shoveling as much food as he can into his mouth before a buzzer sounds and the platform descends another level.

Goreng looks on, digusted: The food is scattered all over the platform, much of it half-eaten. Clearly, these are someone’s disgusting leftovers.

Trimagasi urges Goreng to eat, and explains that they are very fortunate indeed: At level 48 there’s still enough food leftover from the prisoners on the 47 levels above that they won’t starve this month. At the end of every month, he says, each pair of cellmates are put to sleep with gas and wake up on a new level that is chosen at random by the people operating the cruel social experiment.

Trimagasi tells Goreng he once spent a month on level 132, where not a scrap of food is left by the time the platform descends. Goreng asks the old man how he survived, and Trimagasi demures.

We also learn that Goreng voluntarily entered in exchange for a real-world opportunity promised to him after he spends six months inside. Trimagasi was sent there as punishment: Infuriated by a TV commercial for a self-sharpening knife called the Samurai Plus after he’d just purchased a knife sharpening kit, Trimagasi threw his TV out of his window and unintentionally killed an illegal immigrant who was riding a bicycle below. He’s approaching the end of his two-year sentence in what the authorities call the VSC, short for Vertical Self-management Center.

Each prisoner is allowed to take one item with them inside: Goreng takes a copy of The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, harboring romantic notions of finally reading the book with his time in the prison. Trimagasi, who loves to use the word “obviously,” told Goreng his choice of item was obvious: His prized Samurai Plus, which he cradles lovingly as he boasts about how it can cut concrete without dulling.

Goreng puts two and two together, realizing how Trimagasi survived on level 132.

The Platform is a blunt allegory for human civilization, specifically the enormous wealth disparities of modern societies. The occupants of level 1 are the Jeff Bezoses and Walton families of the world, people with unimaginable, multigenerational wealth pigging out on life’s resources without thinking of the starving street children of India, the homeless of cities like New York and San Francisco, the families in North Korea eating tree bark.

Some reviewers think it’s a critique of capitalism, but I think it’s more universal than that: The kleptocrats of countries like Mexico, Russia and Brazil, the monarchies and emirates of the Middle East, and the party bigwigs of communist countries like China pig out on their own respective first levels while the people 130 “levels” down starve just the same.

The rest of us? We’re in the 30s, 40s and 50s, happily scarfing down the scraps from above, the ad revenue the Zuckerbergs and Pichais allow us by their forbearance, the slightly comfortable salaries allowed by corporate shareholders, the house and garage we might enjoy if we’re fortunate enough to run a successful small business in an industry that hasn’t been pillaged by the multinationals yet.

Looking down at the levels below in The Platform.

A plan to preserve food for the lower levels by force.

Trimigasi with his beloved Samurai Plus.

A poster for the Japanese release of The Platform. Credit: Netflix

Some people might find the movie heavy-handed, but I don’t see it that way. As uncomfortable as it is to watch at times, reality is much, much worse. The fact that some of the movie’s scenes are difficult to watch is testament to how lucky we are to be born in circumstances where that kind of suffering isn’t part of our experience, let alone our daily lives. Show The Platform to one of the handful of people to ever escape a North Korean hard labor camp, for instance, and they probably won’t even blink.

It also shows how our betters divide and conquer to keep the rest of us distracted and themselves secure. The idea that most people who receive social services are lazy bums is a popular one in some quarters, encouraging people not to have empathy for the less well off, but to loathe them. Likewise, the people occupying the higher floors of The Platform’s prison don’t feel sorry for those beneath them. In one scene, two cellmates tell a man they’ll help him ascend to their floor, then literally shit on him as he’s just within reach, cackling with delight as he falls.

I didn’t take it as a call for socialism either. The movie makes it pretty clear that neither asking people to moderate their consumption, nor trying to enforce sharing works out for the people who try those methods. Indeed when socialism has worked in real world circumstances, it’s been part of a hybrid model that still uses capitalism as its economic engine.

Mostly, The Platform exists to make people think. While Jeff Bezos goes to sleep tonight in his $50 million compound estate, dreaming of his next vanity flight to low Earth orbit or the next hypercar he’s going to buy, there’s someone shivering on a park bench with 15 cents in their pocket, stomach grumbling, knowing the people who pass them by every day don’t even see them as human.