Alphaville

There’s this Jean-Luc Godard film, Alphaville, from the ‘60s, I say. Did you ever see it?

Priya, shaking her head.

It’s about a futuristic city, ruled by a evil AI: Alpha-60, I say. That outlaws free thought. Bans all creative expression, on punishment of death. And arrests all those who show emotion, before killing them.

There’s this great interrogation scene, I say. The evil AI hauls Lemmy Caution in – he’s the protagonist, the hardboiled detective type who’s investigating the city.

Caution is defiant, I say. He interrogates the interrogator in turn. What is quicker than the wind? he asks. What can cover the Earth? Which came first, day or night? What is the cause of the world. The AI answers those questions easily enough. Thought, it says. Darkness, it says. Day – but it was only a day ahead, it says. Love, it says.

Caution presses on, I say. What is your opposite? he asks. What is madness? Why to humans revolt? What, for each of us, is inevitable? And what is the greatest marvel? Myself, the AI says. A forgotten way, it says. To find beauty, either in life or death, it says. Happiness, it says. That each day death strikes and we live as though we were immortal. That is the greatest marvel.

Poetic answers, for a computer, Priya says.

Not bad, Caution grants, I say. But he goes still further. What is the meaning of being? Why is there anything rather than nothing? For what does nihilism prepare us? How do we conjure meaning from meaninglessness? What is the difference between nature and machine?

And what does the AI answer? Priya asks.

Nothing at all, I say.

Caution quotes from a book by Paul Éluard, the poet, I say. The Capital of Pain. I forget the lines. And tries to make Anna Karina’s character tell him she loves him. Love is totally banned in Alphaville, you see.

Does she love him? Priya asks. Do they destroy the supercomputer? Does love win in the end?

The AI destroys itself, I say. It realises that it has no soul. As for Caution and Karina, they escape, I say. They drive off into the outer realms.

That’s what they do in Bladerunner, too: Harrison Ford escapes with the synth … Priya says. Which is all very well, philosopher. But love’s not banned on this campus. Organisational Management is positive pro-love.