Joan is Awful

Joan is Awful, Black Mirror's clever take on AI, combines quantum computing, a satire on clickbait and last but not least, the elimination of privacy, is a total hoot while being rather disquieting at the same time.

The content machine does seem to be catching up to people’s real lives: The gap between a huge financial scandal and the announcement of the inevitable Michael Lewis book about it used to be years or months; now it’s days. In the UK, Sky produced a dramatization of the British government’s handling of the pandemic while Covid-19 was still tearing through communities. (Spoiler alert: They blew it.)

The logical conclusion of that narrowing of the gap between inspiration and dramatization—through Black Mirror’s twisted, worst-case-scenario lens—is what viewers see in “Joan Is Awful”: personalized content, generated by artificial intelligence, using deepfakes of famous actors as stand-ins for regular people. Joan—a mid-level executive at a generic startup played by Schitt’s Creek’s Annie Murphy—gets home after a difficult day at the office to find the events of that very day have been turned into a slick television show starring Salma Hayek as the titular character. Things spiral from there—there are layers upon layers, content all the way down.

Two questions to ask are ... who do you trust and will AI, as per Bill Joy's brilliant Why the Future doesn't Need Us, take over running things because humanity's doing a rather inept job of managing business on planet earth as we speak. 

No one knows, do one. - Fat Waller