Last spring, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testified before a Senate subcommittee about the need to regulate the AI industry, and one of the big questions he faced was how the burgeoning technology would affect jobs – namely, would people be replaced by artificial intelligence at the workplace?
Altman predicted that there will indeed be an impact on jobs because of AI, but added “I’m very optimistic about how great the jobs of the future will be.”
Of course, “great” is a fairly relative term. Which takes us to THX 1138, the first feature film directed by George Lucas, which isn’t just a dystopic tale of the future, but also… a workplace drama.
Robert Duvall stars in the 1971 film as the title character, a worker drone in a world of worker drones where basic human functions like emotion, sex, and family are forbidden, replaced by state-mandated drugs that control the masses, resulting in a workforce population who are constantly heeding the advice of their god, a figure known as OMM: “Work hard, increase production, prevent accidents, and be happy.” Got it, OMM!
Everyone dresses in white, everyone has a shaved head, and everyone is working towards, apparently, some greater good for society, though what that is exactly is extremely opaque. The population live under a state of constant surveillance – they even have cameras in their medicine cabinets, which I guess isn’t too different from the Alexa in my bathroom – and Lucas constantly cuts to various control rooms where workers are monitoring other workers by video, audio, and pretty much any other means possible, while directives and course-corrections are prescribed regarding any citizen who may be veering off their pre-designated path. (Picture a one on one with your manager, except if they were a disembodied voice telling you to take more pills.)
As for THX, he has a particularly challenging job: robot construction. The society depicted in the film is seemingly run by some type of AI, with robot police officers enforcing the rule of law. But the building of these machines is delicate work, and in a memorable sequence, an explosion takes out a competing sector at THX’s robot factory. “Do not abandon your post. There is no danger of radiation leakage,” one of the film’s many unseen voices announces as bloodied and misshapen bodies are dragged from the accident site. As THX continues his tricky work, another announcement follows: “That accident over in Red Sector L destroyed another 63 personnel, giving them a total of 242 lost to our 195. Keep up the good work and prevent accidents!”
Are these the kind of jobs Sam Altman was talking about?
That an artificial intelligence is behind the dehumanized world of THX 1138 is a logical assumption, what with the apparently sentient robots serving as the authority figures and the complex system of audio-visual suppression that is in place. But as the film progresses, this becomes a bit of a chicken and egg question. It’s humans who monitor their fellow citizens, but as we saw in Colossus: The Forbin Project, it doesn’t take much for an AI to get mankind to fall into place and do its bidding. So did an AI create the world that THX lives in, and its human slaves keep it running (good work if you can find it, just like Altman promised)? Or did an already enslaved humanity create an AI to facilitate running their dystopia? Even the holographic entertainment that serves to keep the masses tranquil (along with those all-important drugs) proves to be sort of maybe kinda human: Eventually, THX meets a hologram (Don Pedro Colley) who proclaims that he’s “not real”... despite appearances to the contrary. Meanwhile, the god OMM turns out to be nothing but a wall hanging in a TV studio spouting out pre-recorded messages.
“We think that regulatory intervention by governments will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models [of AI],” Altman told that Senate subcommittee. In other words, humans and AI will need to work together in the future, which seems to be how things operate in THX land.
While THX 1138 is another variation of the “fear the future” genre where apocalypses, sentient machines, or maybe just some tasty Soylent Green add up to a world for which we are quite possibly headed if we don’t learn the lessons of the film we are watching, a major undercurrent of the piece is the economics of this place. Everything is about the bottom line, from the efficiency of the workforce – keep ‘em drugged in order to keep ‘em productive – to the mercenary us-vs.-them ideology of competing groups, the constant surveillance of an HR department that by no means has its employees’ best interests in mind, and all the way through to the budget allocated to recapturing THX once he attempts escape from his hellscape/place of employment (14,000 credits and not a credit more!).
Even at the age of 26, which is how old Lucas was when THX 1138 opened (and bombed), the filmmaker had dollars and cents thinking informing his work. No shade here – if you want to make movies, especially more than one, you need to understand the economics of the industry. And so just as Lucas would go on to make now-legendary unorthodox but smart business decisions, like taking the merchandising rights for Star Wars over a pay raise, we can see his first feature is squarely focused on commerce, despite the film’s sci-fi trappings.
At one point early in the movie, at the end of his shift THX takes a walk through a ghastly shopping mall of sorts which, really, doesn’t seem all that different from a mall of the 21st century. He buys a bright red dodecahedron-shaped… thing? There’s a store full of them, in various colors. What this object does or why he needs it is unclear, and right after he gets home to his apartment he tosses it in the trash. Mindless consumerism. It’s like a Black Friday sale, only in the future.
Also to be found in that apartment is LUH 3417 (Maggie McOmie), THX’s roommate. Lucas and his co-writer Walter Murch purposely obfuscate much of the characters’ motivations, but for some reason LUH has been tampering with THX’s drug intake. Soon the two are overcome by, of all things, emotion. They fall in love, and they also finally question their very existence and whether or not they can escape the tyranny of this world. Meanwhile, Donald Pleasence inserts his singularly weird and welcome nose into the situation as SEN 5241, who seems to simultaneously rat out LUH to the authorities while also proving to be a malcontent himself. He’s like that annoying person at work who won’t leave you alone in the breakroom.
That’s the thing about the movie. As strange and alien as THX and LUH’s world is, there are very recognizable aspects as well, particularly regarding the workplace side of things. Sam Altman predicts that there will be “great” jobs in the future, but Lucas’ film – made over 50 years ago at this point – promises, in many ways, more of what we already have. A workaday existence. Not “great,” but it pays the bills.
Lucas’ father, George Sr., owned an office supply business when George Jr. was growing up in Modesto, California. “He wanted me to go into his business,” Lucas recalled of his father in 2008. “I said, ‘I’m absolutely not going to do it. … I will never go to work every day doing the same thing day in and day out.’” You can practically see the teenage Lucas imagining that future – a bunch of worker drones spending every day the same way, for a lifetime. Perhaps all clad in white, and even with shaved heads!
In the biography George Lucas: A Life by Brian Jay Jones, the author asserts that during one particularly fierce blow-out, Lucas told his father that not only would he not join him in the family business, but he would strike out on his own and become a millionaire by the time he was 30. How many 18-year-olds have said that very same thing to their parents? And yet, Lucas actually pulled it off; after the release of his follow-up to THX 1138, American Graffiti, he was a multi-millionaire.
Which takes us to the climax of THX 1138, where Duvall’s character has evaded the robo-cops (they ran out of credits!) and is ascending a very long ladder in a vast tunnel. The robots yell to him that he cannot survive without their protection, and anyway, they only want to help him. They genuinely seem to mean it, which Lucas’ father no doubt did as well when urging him to take a job in the family business. It’s almost too easy to read into, as THX/Lucas emerges from the tunnel to find himself above ground for the first time, facing a setting sun and the great unknown. Freedom.
THX beat the odds. Lucas beat the odds. They won the game. But as for the rest of us…? Work hard, increase production, prevent accidents. And be happy!
Talk to Executive Editor Scott Collura on Twitter at @ScottCollura, or listen to his Star Trek podcast, Transporter Room 3. Or do both!
