According to engadget, the Sundance documentary ‘Ghost in the Machine’ makes a bold argument that the pursuit of artificial intelligence and Silicon Valley itself is fundamentally rooted in eugenics. Director Valerie Veatch uses interviews with philosophers, AI researchers, and historians to frame the rise of AI as a feature of techno-fascism. The film highlights the legacy of figures like mathematician Karl Pearson, who pioneered statistics while also quantifying racial hierarchies, and William Shockley, the transistor co-creator and avowed white supremacist. It connects this history directly to modern figures like Elon Musk, who has fostered a reportedly racist work environment at Tesla, suggesting he is part of a pattern. The documentary also revisits known failures like Microsoft’s racist Tay chatbot and the reliance on low-wage workers in Africa to label AI data labeling. Ultimately, the film presents AI as a project that aims to demean humans and cement power for a techno-elite.
Connecting the Dots
Here’s the thing: the most damning part of this argument isn’t the modern stuff. We’ve seen the Tay disaster. We know about the exploitative data labor. But tracing the ideological lineage back to the very foundations of the fields that enable AI? That hits different. Learning that Karl Pearson, the father of modern statistics, was a hardcore eugenicist is a gut punch. His work was about finding “scientific” proof for racial superiority. And then you have William Shockley, literally a key inventor of the silicon age, using his Stanford perch to push the same garbage. It makes you wonder: how much of that worldview got baked into the culture of the Valley from day one? It wasn’t just a few bad apples; it was in the soil the whole time.
A Pattern, Not an Anomaly
This is where the film’s link to someone like Elon Musk becomes less of a stretch and more of a logical endpoint. When you look at Musk’s record—the reportedly racist environment at Tesla, the online bigotry, the flirtations with antisemitic conspiracies—he starts to look less like a rogue billionaire and more like a product of a system that never fully purged its worst instincts. The film’s central question is brutal and simple: why on earth would we trust people with this mindset to build our future? When the goal is creating a supposedly superior intelligence, the shadow of eugenics isn’t just a coincidence. It’s a warning.
The One-Sided Critique
Now, I can already hear the counter-argument. The review admits the film leaves “no room for considering potential benefits.” That’s a fair criticism. It’s a polemic, not a balanced report. In the middle of an AI hype cycle fueled by hundreds of billions in investment, a piece like this will be dismissed by many as a hit job. But maybe that’s the point. We’re drowning in boosterism. Every other day there’s a new demo, a new promise, a new flashy video of something amazing. The downsides—the bias, the energy use, the labor exploitation, the concentration of power—often get framed as minor bugs to be fixed later. This documentary says no, these aren’t bugs. They are the direct consequence of a poisoned tree. Even if you think it goes too far, that perspective needs to be in the room. AI should be able to withstand this level of scrutiny, especially when it’s coming from our own history books.
