Sundance’s fast-paced documentary traces how modern AI’s obsession with “intelligence” and innovation is rooted in the eugenics, sexism, and racial hierarchies that have long shaped Silicon Valley and its technology.
This is one in a series of film reviews from the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, highlighting films by women, transgender, or non-binary directors that tell compelling stories about the lives of women and girls.
ghost in the machine, The fast-paced, gripping documentary, directed by Valerie Vicci and screened as part of Sundance’s NEXT program, begins with Antonio Gramsci’s famous quote: “The old world is dying, and the new world is struggling to be born. This is the age of monsters.”
It’s a fitting beginning for a film that questions just how big the technology boom that has defined the past few decades has become, and its troubled origins.
Eugenics itself relies on a series of algorithms, with systems for measuring racialized traits to determine things like how to “breed” the “best” humans. This is the same kind of algorithm behind much of the philosophy of machine learning.
ghost offers impressive news clips, archival footage, and interviews with experts ranging from anthropologists and historians to computer scientists and philosophers, highlighting the film’s points with a unique aesthetic and audio. The film takes viewers through a multi-step history, culminating in the dizzying revelation that today’s mania for artificial intelligence is underpinned by a sexist and racist worldview that holds that some people deserve wealth and power, while others don’t.
Although AI is hailed by some as part of a golden age of technology, ghost It convincingly explains how the concept of “artificial intelligence,” which began as an empty marketing term, relies on an understanding of “general intelligence” associated with the eugenics movement. After all, how can intelligence be generalized or even measured without metrics to determine who or what proves human-level intelligence and what it means?
Eugenics itself relies on a series of algorithms, with systems for measuring racial traits to determine things like how to “breed” the “best” humans. This is the same kind of algorithm behind much of the philosophy of machine learning. And IQ tests, which are said to test a person’s general reasoning and logic, also originate from eugenics. Eugenics is the eugenics movement that led some states to legalize forced sterilization of “mentally feebleminded” or undesirable people in the early 20th century, and also influenced Nazi extermination programs in the 1930s and 1940s.
Although eugenics understandably fell out of favor after World War II, ghost This book chronicles how the logic and underlying misogyny and white supremacy lurk at the edges of American technological innovation, from the founding of Silicon Valley to the latest AI boom.
Silicon Valley has created a myth around the (mostly) male “innovators” behind the Internet, Web 2.0, social media, and AI. According to ghostthis cult of so-called genius maintains an environment where power begets more power and women and people of color are secondary to the desires of wealthy white male elites. This mindset leads to predatory practices such as data mining, exploitation, surveillance, cryptocurrencies, and digital colonialism. In other words, technology companies are outsourcing their work to poor communities around the world.
…Today’s interest in artificial intelligence is fueled by a sexist and racist worldview that holds that some people deserve wealth and power, while others do not.
While AI is treated like a miraculous combination of magic and science, it actually uses up human labor and data, not to mention environmental, cultural, and political costs. It uses vast amounts of water, has an alarming power to shape people’s perceptions of reality, and gives a few people control over much of what we perceive as truth, both online and offline.
ghost A must-see for anyone who casually interacts with an AI chatbot or asks ChatGPT to write an email without considering the very human costs in the real world. Ultimately, this film reminds us that human agency exists, and there is still hope for a future where we can take advantage of it.
