AI’s Deep political project revealed in new documentary.
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Rather than being a neutral technology gone slightly wrong, AI is a deeply political project rooted in older, darker traditions a new documentary featuring Dan McQuillan and other expert commentators argued.
Dr McQuillan joined the director Valerie Veatch on a panel discussion after the premier of The Ghost in the Machine. The film explores the untold origins of artificial intelligence from turn of the century eugenics thinkers who claimed that science could and should be used to “improve” the human population. Under the guise of objectivity they ranked and segregated people by race, class, disability and perceived “fitness”.
The 110 minute Sundance documentary combines interviews with over 40 global AI experts with archival film into a compelling film essay revealing its distinctly lineal roots. The term ‘Ghost in the machine’ was coined by English philosopher Gilbert Ryle to dismiss the notion that mind and body occupy separate realms. In her film Veatch reworks this ghost notion to show that a technology presented as mechanical and neutral is instead animated by unseen human forces based on embedded values and inherited biases.
The 110 minute Sundance documentary combines interviews with over 40 global AI experts with archival film into a compelling film essay revealing its distinctly lineal roots. The term ‘Ghost in the machine’ was coined by English philosopher Gilbert Ryle to dismiss the notion that mind and body occupy separate realms. In her film Veatch reworks this ghost notion to show that a technology presented as mechanical and neutral is instead animated by unseen human forces based on embedded values and inherited biases.
For McQuillan, today’s AI boom is not simply about efficiency, innovation, or even “superintelligence” but a continuation—under digital cover—of a race‑based, hierarchical worldview that can be traced back to eugenics and early 20th‑century scientism. The film situates today’s AI leaders—Silicon Valley founders, AI safety gurus, and billionaire funders—within this longer lineage.
From Eugenics to Machine Intelligence
McQuillan’s argument, both in the film and in his broader work, is that contemporary AI—especially large‑scale predictive and classificatory systems—rests on the same basic impulse:
It’s to turn messy human life into data, to rank and sort it, and to justify unequal treatment as ‘scientific’ necessity. Where eugenicists wielded the language of heredity, today’s AI leaders speak of ‘optimization’, ‘risk scoring,’ and ‘objective prediction.’ The vocabulary has changed but the underlying logic has not.
Dr Dan McQuillan, Computer Science
In McQuillan’s view, the people driving AI today are not detached engineers accidentally stumbling into harm but instead are participants in a project that encodes and amplifies existing forms of domination, from racialized policing and border control to automated welfare sanctions and militarized targeting systems.
AI as Anti‑Democratic Infrastructure
In the panel discussion following the film, McQuillan argued against the contention of AI as an otherwise neutral but badly used technology. “The problem is AI itself, as it is being built and deployed.”
Characterising AI as anti-work and inherently colonial., McQuillan went to claim that the technology provided the machinery destroys jobs through its claims to automate them, surveilling existing workers into compliance while also extracting data, energy and labour from the global south to serve corporate military interests in the Global North. By turning complex social problems into technical classification tasks, AI also erases responsibility and contestation.
McQuillan points to calls for an ethical AI, an AI for good, or the idea that with the right regulations and safeguards, we can keep the technology but strip out the harms as “comforting narratives”. In his view, those narratives are part of what he calls a “recuperation of resistance” -the industry’s ability to absorb critiques, rebrand itself as responsible or safety‑conscious, while continuing expanding its power.
AI as a Mask‑Off Technology
The promise that AI will “solve” everything—climate change, inequality, governance—is, he argues, an act of desperation by a system that has run out of credible stories about progress.
States and corporations continue to pouring resource into AI, not because it is genuinely transformative in a humane sense, but because it offers a new frontier for accumulation – data centres, infrastructure that can channel public money and natural resources into private profit, a governance shortcut - automated systems that can manage, police and discipline without visible political debate, - while legitimises a narrative that justifies harsh policies and deep inequalities as the outcome of a neutral algorithms.
“The link to eugenics is not metaphorical. Then as now, a technocratic elite deploys science‑like language to secure authority over who counts, who belongs, and who can be sacrificed,” McQuillan concluded.
What Resistance Must Look Like
Instead of calls to rein in AI Dan McQuillan and over 30 experts interviewed for the documentary say instead that AI, as currently constituted, is an extension of a long, violent tradition that fuses racial hierarchy, technocratic control, and capitalist extraction. To resist AI is not to stand against progress; it is to refuse a future in which the old eugenic dream is reborn inside the black box of the machine.
Ghost in the Machine is being screened at the Curzon Cinema Bloomsbury