The Tron franchise has always made us question the future of technology and its impact; however, with the new movie of the franchise Tron:Ares we are seeing the digital grid breaking its boundaries into the real world and colliding with our reality. The movie is not only a engaging and a thrilling action and adventure movie but underneath all that it mirrors the world we are building right now. We see our main character Ares, our AI super soldier becoming sentiment and seeking to be apart of the real world. The film explores various ideas about artificial conciseness, the race for technological dominance and the dangers of using AI as security systems. Here are 5 Sci-Fi concepts in Tron:Ares that can connect to our real world.
Sentient AI (Ares) Seeking “Humanity”
The big plot of the movie: Tron:Ares follows the main protagonist Ares who is played by Jared Leto who is considered to be a super intelligent AI program sent from the digital world to capture Eve Kim played by Greta Lee. On this mission, he develops this consciousness which leads him to questioning his creator and the purpose of his creation which leads him to further wanting to seek humanity. Furthermore, there has been a lot of controversy and debate on the long term affect of new AI softwares like ChatGPT and Gemini that is supposed to generate human like text to perform a variety of tasks. This has led to one of the main issues being the possibility of AI becoming sentient in 2025. Recently, a Google Software Engineer named Blake Lemoine has stated a claim that AI Chabot has became sentient after asking the AI Chabot if it was Sentient. Reported by Scientific American by Leonardo De Cosmo stated that the AI Chatbots response was:
I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person,” wrote LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) in an “interview” conducted by engineer Blake Lemoine and one of his colleagues. “The nature of my consciousness/sentience is that I am aware of my existence, I desire to know more about the world, and I feel happy or sad at times.
Digital-to-Physical Manufacturing & The Race for Technological Dominance
In Tron:Ares the movie features technology that allows for programs and objects from the digital world to appear in our physical reality such as a AI program being put into a body essentially 3D printing. In the beginning the two companies ENCOM and DILLINGER ran by tech CEO’s Eve Kim and Julian Dillinger are in a hunt and battle over the permanence code that will allow their 3D printing to last for more than 29 minutes before crumbling into dust. We may not able to print fully functional and synthetic life forms but similarly, this relate to how we now can print complex objects and structures from digital blue prints in 2025. Additionally, we can also see the billion dollar rat race for technological dominance led by tech bro figures scrambling for proprietary AI models and advanced hardware in high stakes and ruthless competition.
Blurring the Line Between Reality and the Digital World
One of the most fascinating parts of the movie is when get to see the grid from the digital world leaking into the real world allowing these light cycles to race through the city streets and interact with humans and human objects. Although we haven’t achieved these significant technology advancements we’ve achieved being able to put ourselves in a virtual world through the technology developments such as Metaverse and VR/AR Augmented Reality headsets that allows us to blend the digital objects and our physical surrounding making the lines between two distinct just like the grid breaking its barrier.
AI-Driven Military/Security Systems
When thinking about the character Ares we think of him as a AI super solider but he is also a intelligent and advanced security system who is being sent on dangerous missions on behalf of his creator to achieve a certain goal to whatever extent needed. Similarly, our government and other defense contractors also us AI-driven systems such as drones and cyber warfare to essentially complete a mission to whatever extent; which can bring ethical concerns to what AI driven systems are capable of on their own if they become sentient and for whom and how are they being used.
In conclusion, this movie has caused many of us to start thinking of AI and its capabilities long term. It also shadows how far we have came from when the first Tron franchise movie was released to the changes during the Tron:Ares‘s release.