Artificial Inequality Review: A Sleek but Simplistic Look At Bot Rights

Bharadwaj’s debut documentary explores some interesting concepts, but cares more about navel gazing than realistic change.

Bots. They’re everywhere in our lives; cooking our food, cleaning our streets, driving our ships. But have you ever wondered what’s going on in their silicon brains? Are they capable of wanting, and if so, what is it that they would even want?

In her debut documentary, Dr. Sabrita Bharadwaj attempts to answer those questions.

While this may be her first feature-length film, Bharadwaj had a few other modest projects under her belt, perhaps most notably having directed a handful of episodes of the family edutainment series How We Make It, where craftsmen and artists explore the techniques behind their various trades. When I’d stumbled across the show a few years ago, I’d found it a deeply restful watch to doze off to. So when I heard that one of the creators was striking out on her own to attempt something a little meatier, I was excited.

Unfortunately, Artificial Inequality fails to live up to my hopes.

Which isn’t to say it’s bad! The film generated a lot of buzz, and I understand why. The editing is a striking mixture of the ever-popular sharp, fast cuts and the slower, rolling shots that have become hallmarks of Preservation Alliance cinema. The pacing is gripping, and the soundtrack is nothing short of phenomenal.

But that’s all just window dressing. What of the heart of the story? Artificial Inequality primarily explores the rights of AIs within the polity of the Preservation Alliance, particularly exploring the bounds of their ‘bot guardian’ system, and how some are coming to chafe against it. We are introduced to Scaper, a terraforming-management system, who shares its struggles connecting with humans as an un-bodied entity. A MedSystem, who has named itself Hippocratic Oath V107, who argues that bots should have the same control over their update patches and repairs that humans have for their own medical procedures. Bethari, a multi-purpose household bot, shares a story of fighting to be seen as a woman under local law, including attempting to be legally listed as a mother to the children in the creche she supervises.

They’re all reasonably compelling stories, and arguably could have supported the piece on their own. But far and away, the true meat of the documentary— and the part which has garnered the most attention— is the thread about the rogue SecUnit.

If you’ve been at all plugged into the news lately, you’ve probably paid at least passing attention to the ongoing GrayChris-AmaSoft conflict, which at this point, has sustained a body count in the tens of thousands. The spark of the whole thing, of course, was the reveal that GrayChris had attempted— and partially succeeded— in murdering a pair of planetary survey teams to hide the discovery and sale of alien remnants. In the initial articles about the situation, the SecUnit was a footnote, a splash of human interest: “To show their appreciation of the AmaSoft SecUnit that helped save their life, Dr. Mensah and the PresAux survey team has purchased it and will be taking it home.”

A footnote no longer. The documentary reveals that the SecUnit was rogue, and once more, its broken governor module was the only reason for the PresAux survey team’s survival.

“I never wanted to ‘go rogue,” the SecUnit says, near the beginning of film. “What I wanted was to do my fucking job. It just became obvious there was no way I could do that while following the company’s idiot orders.”

The SecUnit’s tale it chilling, filled with anecdotes of brutal violence, torture, and below it all, corporate neglect. One cannot help but become invested as the SecUnit describes the massacre that motivated its disobedience, and the stumbling steps to took towards finding freedom.

But for all that the SecUnit sections are the heart of the film, they’re also the source of its extreme tonal issues. While the stories of the other bots are not without pathos, none of them would feel particularly out of place in a family sit com. It makes for an unpleasant contrast against the bleak reality of SecUnits. Even within the SecUnit’s own narrative, the tone ping-pongs wildly. One scene, the SecUnit describes its fear of being stripped for parts; the next, a PresAux scientist laughs about bonding with the SecUnit over a mutual affection for soap operas.

However jarring it may be, the SecUnit really sells it, swinging seamlessly from stiff detachment to dry sarcasm to cold fury. Those who have only ever known SecUnits as faceless monsters from news clips or action films might find the range of emotions hard to believe.

Which is the issue, of course. Some people don’t believe it.

It’s a cycle we’ve seen time and time again, of course. A hit documentary will come out, exploring the hugely positive effect some health treatment or video game or what-have-you. It’ll get some press, maybe a couple of awards. And then a few years later, it’ll turn out the whole thing was crafted by corporate writers, the interviewees paid hefty sums of cash to the sponsoring company look good. And if that can be done with humans, many critics are understandably pointing how easily it could be accomplished with beings who can literally be reprogrammed to say whatever their owners (or, as the case may be, guardians) might want.

For my part, I don’t believe Artificial Inequality is a scam or a hoax. For all its rough edges, Bharadwaj’s genuine passion shines through. More to the point, I can’t tell what end goal such a deception would serve.

No, my issues with the film’s ethical stance has nothing to do with its veracity. My doubt is in whether this is the time to be asking these questions at all.

Artificial Inequality feels like a project who’s scope got away from itself. If Bharadwaj had simply kept her focus on the Preservation AIs, there would have been a coherent connection between the different threads. Instead, she sought to make it a documentary about all AIs— ignoring the fact that they vary so wildly in form and function to make such categorization next to meaningless.

The Preservation Alliance was founded on ideals of radical socialism— ideals that many here in the Rim would call a childish daydream. But with free water, food, education, shelter, and health-care, PA has made it work. They have secured a basic standard of living for their citizens that we in corporate territory will have to fight for decades to even see on the horizon. With all this achieved, if their alliance wants to spend their time and effort fine-tuning their system for bots, more power to them.

In the Rim, we don’t have that luxury.

However pre-written the SecUnit’s lines may or may not have been, I felt them stirring at my heart. At the same time, I recalled a handful of my grandparents, the ones who just barely managed to escape indentured servitude after the liquidation of Telestica in ‘09. And when I think of my Papi, who lost his arm to a SecUnit during that escape.

I wonder what he would say if someone told him he should have felt sorry for the SecUnit that dragged his friends back to that hell-hole. He probably would’ve laughed in their face.

If you’re looking for a documentary that’ll provide you with some new perspectives, this film will give them to you. But don’t go in expecting concrete answers or viable next steps. Ultimately, Artificial Inequality weaves a narrative with an overabundance of sympathy, but very little practicality.

Make things better for bots? Sure, that’s a laudable sentiment. But for now, I’d rather we direct our focus at improving the system for the billions of struggling humans.

- Janette Moroe
FlashBang Media