The Last Useful Man
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
-
Gilbert Ryle
16 min read
The article directly references Ryle's 1945 distinction between 'knowledge of' and 'knowledge how' as the philosophical framework underpinning Cruise's films. Understanding Ryle's critique of Cartesian dualism and his concept of 'the ghost in the machine' provides essential context for the article's argument about embodied competence.
-
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
14 min read
The article explicitly discusses Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception and his argument that consciousness and body are inseparable. His influence on the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition, mentioned in the article, makes this essential background for understanding the philosophical stakes of 'embodied knowledge.'
-
The Machine Stops
12 min read
Forster's 1909 short story is quoted at length in the article as a prophetic vision of humanity's dangerous dependence on technology. The article frames it as anticipating our current AI moment, making the story's full context highly relevant to understanding the cultural critique being made.
About halfway through Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, Tom Cruise goes for a run on a treadmill. The treadmill is on the USS Ohio, a submarine manned exclusively by implausibly attractive people. One of those people is not who they seem: a cultist, radicalized by the Entity, the film’s AI antagonist. The cultist sneaks up behind Cruise and lunges with a knife. Things look dicey for a moment — until Cruise gains some distance and kicks him repeatedly in the head. While doing so, he imparts a few words of wisdom: “You spend too much time on the internet.”
What divides the heroes and villains in Final Reckoning is simple: the villains have to Google things, and the heroes do not. There are three bad guys, more or less. First, the Entity, a rogue AI halfway through its plan for global domination. Second, Gabriel, the Entity’s meat puppet. Third, a gang of surprisingly likable Russians who take Cruise’s team hostage in a house in Alaska. What unites the villains isn’t malice so much as it is uselessness. I mean that precisely. They are often effective, even successful. But never useful.
The Entity is a strikingly lazy AI. Instead of designing and synthesizing a new biological agent able to wipe out all humans or speedrunning a century of robotics development and building its own army of Terminators, it confines itself to a few embarrassingly plausible tricks. It seeds the internet with convincing fake images and videos, converts a set of mindless followers to do its bidding, and commandeers the world’s atomic arsenal — technologies from the 1950s that I imagine are indeed protected by complex security arrangements, but hardly require a new computing paradigm to defeat.
Gabriel and the Russians are no better. Gabriel has only one move: stealing something that’s not his, and then using it to blackmail Tom Cruise into doing all the work, like the ultimate free-rider on a classroom group project. As for the Russians, despite needing to hack a secure DoD server, not one of them can operate a computer. Just point a gun, give the clever people a deadline, and tell them to get to work.
Cruise and his team, by contrast, are profound in their usefulness, built for a world where accessing the internet means certain death. They use
...This excerpt is provided for preview purposes. Full article content is available on the original publication.