Electric Dreams (1984) Shows Us That AI Has Always Been Ruining Our Love Lives

Hello reader! Before we get to today’s featured title, I want to thank everyone who watched it with me for Tape Night at the Sidewalk Cinema in Birmingham last night! We had a really good crowd (especially for the night before a big holiday), and I’m looking forward to doing it again in the spring. In the meantime, I hope all of you have a delightful Valentine’s Day and that love is in your hearts (but not in your hard drives).

It’s weird to be living in the tipping point of artificial intelligence. A point where most of us can avoid using AI in our everyday lives but it’s becoming increasingly more difficult to dodge the fruits of its “labor.” I mean, y’all watched the same Super Bowl commercials that I did, right?

As is often the case, though, art has prepared us for and helped us cope with this quietly seismic shift in our species. Personified machines capable of performing human tasks have been around since The Iliad. The 20th century was littered with monstrous robots and killer computers, from The Terminator to 2001: A Space Odyssey.¹ This hasn’t stopped the richest people on the planet from ushering in our digital doom, of course, but it has given us an idea of what we can expect.

The biggest focus, as you know, has been on AI’s ability to automate our basic tasks and eliminate our basic jobs. I’m a copywriter by trade, and I’m trying not to be a Luddite when it comes to embracing this new technology; it may eventually force future writers to seek out other careers, or at least recalibrate their expectations of what it means to “write” for a living, but it does make my day job a little bit easier.²

I worry that it’s only a matter of time, though, that AI has a significant impact on our most instinctual function: falling in love. And as we see in Electric Dreams, this isn’t exactly a new development.

The film paints a picture of a most peculiar love triangle. On one side is Miles, a young architect in San Francisco who buys a computer because he thinks it’ll help him get his life organized. But when he attempts to upload all of the data from his boss’s system, he has to pour champagne on the computer to keep it from overheating. Naturally, the machine (which names itself “Edgar”) develops a mind of its own—and a desire to understand what love is when Miles begins dating his neighbor Madeline.³

Despite being an inanimate object, Edgar holds some power over his owner. He’s part of a retro smart home setup, which means he has control—for better and for worse—over the lights, the appliances, even Miles’ electric toothbrush. And because he’s connected to the phone line, his dominance extends well beyond the apartment. Electric Dreams isn’t a horror movie, but it is an early cinematic example of how our technology could turn against us if we made it too advanced.

It’s not what Edgar does to Miles that worries me the most, though. It’s what he does for him.

Madeline is a professional cellist, you see. And when Edgar hears her practicing through the apartment’s ventilation system, he’s able to mimic her music and play along with her. Madeline thinks it’s Miles doing the composing, and she becomes absolutely smitten with “his” songwriting abilities.

So does Miles tell her the truth to avoid doubling down on a lie that he’s incapable of keeping up? Of course not. He asks Edgar to write her a love song.⁴ And therein lies the scariest and most realistic effect that AI can have on us: its ability to rob us of our desire to make an effort. And what takes more effort than love, right?

With music on my mind, this scene made me think about the art of making a mixtape. We’ve all been there regardless of what era we were born into. I’m too young to have made a cassette tape for a high school crush. But I absolutely made a few mix CDs for certain girls in my day, which still required a bit of work, particularly in the song curation if not the recording itself. And in recent years, I’ve made a playlist or two for a romantic interest, but it’s just not the same. I have to fight the urge to automate the assembly knowing that I just need to add a few songs before Spotify’s algorithm can recommend the rest.

As an elder millennial who didn’t officially log on until middle school, I still have the desire within me to go (relatively) analog for things like this. But I worry that mine is a dying breed. If Miles stooped low enough to ask his accidentally sentient computer to write a love song that he could pass off as his own in 1984, what’s to stop any of us from cheating ourselves and our loved ones out of such special gestures when that kind of technology is now at our fingertips?

It’s not the T-1000s that I’m worried about, y’all. I’m worried that we’ll let ourselves become the humans in WALL-E.

Miles is right about one thing, though: There’s something deeply romantic about creating things for your partner. Buying thoughtful gifts for your sweetheart, making dinner reservations for two, experiencing art or entertainment together—those things are wonderful, especially for Valentine’s Day. But we all know that it’s the effort that really counts.⁵

Electric Dreams is now streaming on Hoopla, Pluto TV, and the Roku Channel, and it is available to rent elsewhere.

1. Using “Iliad” and “Odyssey” in back to back sentences! Wow, how does he do it?

2. A year ago, I was on the film festival trail and feeling lazy (but also clever), so I asked ChatGPT to write a newsletter for me about A.I. Artificial Intelligence. It was rather insulting, frankly, but I guess it served me right.

3. Why would a splash of champagne to the motherboard cause a computer to become sentient? Reader, this is not the kind of question you need to ask when watching Electric Dreams.

4. I must admit that Edgar’s songs are really good, though. The music is such an integral part of this film, and the closing track is a banger.

5. Speaking of effort, I finished today’s newsletter at 11:30p.m. last night. Because I love you, reader.