The Future of Something (2023) takes a deep dive into the human anxieties framing an AI-driven world. Across the morphing vignettes of seven AI-generated human support groups—ranging from couples therapy to robot love tensions, online poker addicts to content creators anonymous—the video deftly navigates familiar fears of machinic displacement of the self through the heightened drama of parody. Here we watch hallucinated influencers in crisis, unable to compete with the indifferent gaze of an artificial intelligence that doesn’t care about authenticity or creativity. As the humans band together to console each other in group survival mode, some individuals manipulate the counseling sessions to hawk their Youtube channels and for-sale tricks to beat the AI system, ultimately trumping the idea of a superior human morality. Seated at the height of humanity’s fears of a technological takeover, The Future of Something suggests that the real threat in the room may not be the machinic other, but something more human after all.
