Let’s Watch the Weapons Make the Decisions
Main Cast: David Alexander, Janis Ahern
Director: Stewart Sugg
This week’s Alter short, SLAUGHTERBOTS, doesn’t have a real story, per se. It’s 8 minutes and the first half of it is a presentation given by a CEO (David Alexander, Into the Badlands), showing off his company’s newest weapon, an AI-piloted drone, carrying 3 grams of “shaped explosive” and capable of evading pursuit, bullets, pretty much anything. They are unstoppable, he says. Then he shows what a $25 million order will buy, enough to kill half a city. “The bad half,” he insists.
We then cut to news reports of an attack on the Senate where one senator tells a reporter, “They flew in from everywhere but attacked just one side of the aisle.”
This is the world of SLAUGHTERBOTS, written by Matt Wood from a concept by Stuart J. Russell and directed by Stewart Sugg (KISS KISS BANG BANG – 2001). As the news reports continue, we see a mother chatting with her son, Ollie, who is in Edinburgh. They were supposed to video chat but Ollie is “with people” as his mother scans his social media posts and asks him about a video he posted. “It’s just a human rights thing,” he tells her, “about oppression or whatever.”
We see more news clips of reporters telling the audience to “avoid crowds, protect your family, stay inside” as the Slaughterbots, or anyone with enough money to place an order, are causing mass deaths, targeting universities worldwide, turning to social media posts for their targets, specifically those posts calling out corruption at the highest levels. As the short wraps up, a news report shows a man being interviewed who says people are being targeted for the smallest infractions and when the host asks who could have done this, he replies, “Anyone.”
There’s a short PS at the end from Stuart J. Russell who, it turns out, is a professor of computer science at Berkeley, who’s been studying AI for over 35 years and steps in here to warn us about the dangers of combining drone technology with AI and says we have an opportunity to prevent “the future you just saw” but that “the window to act is closing fast”.
The implications in this short are real and terrifying and I’m honestly surprised that, 7 years since its release, it’s still being marketed as fiction. SLAUGHTERBOTS is like a week away from being reality, and in the current political climate, I think more people need to be watching it and paying attention.
But that’s not why we’re here, I’m just here to watch and review this as a horror short.
The quality of the production is high. If you didn’t know it was supposed to be a movie, the news clips looked pretty real to me.
The cast is made up of people who have solid careers, and have been in things you’ve seen, but always in smaller roles you don’t notice (the mother is played by Janis Ahern who was recently in THE STRANGERS CHAPTER ONE as a waitress while the son, Ollie, is played by Leo Flanagan who, a year later, appeared in an episode of Doctor Who).
I’m really sort of at a loss on this one. I enjoyed it. I thought it was interesting and well-made. It falls more into the found footage category, although shot in real time as opposed to all these people went on this journey and recorded everything and years later the footage was recovered. I feel the purpose of SLAUGHTERBOTS was to sound the alarm to anyone who watches it, and I totally get that, but that’s not my job here. I’m not foolish enough to get into a political debate in a movie review, especially when, on the average, the topic of politics bores me to death and I’m NOT a reactionary type. But I feel like THOSE are the people this movie is being targeted at.
Does SLAUGHTERBOTS succeed as a horror short? Definitely. Should SLAUGHTERBOTS be seen by everyone? Absolutely not. Look, I have people I work with every day who still, five years later, insist COVID isn’t real and the government is making it up. People like that would get hold of a movie like this and, instead of enjoying it for what it is, a horror FICTION, start to get the wrong ideas.
Does that mean SLAUGHTERBOTS shouldn’t exist? Of course not, all art has a right to exist as long as it isn’t hurting anyone. It’s not the art you have to watch out for; it’s the idiots who take it the wrong way and have the complete opposite reaction than what was intended. The intention here, judging by the P.S. from Russell, is that we need to NOT combine AI with weaponized drone technology. But somebody may think that’s just the best idea ever. Like I said, SLAUGHTERBOTS is like a week away from becoming reality, and THAT’S the scariest thing about this short.
Just remember, SLAUGHTERBOTS without the first S is just LAUGHTERBOTS. Maybe that’s what we need more of so everyone can lighten the fk up.
Watch SLAUGHTERBOTS for free on YouTube.
C. Dennis Moore is the author of over 60 published short stories and novellas in the speculative fiction genre. Most recent appearances are in the Dark Highlands 2, What Fears Become, Dead Bait 3 and Dark Highways anthologies. His novels are Revelations, and the Angel Hill stories, The Man in the Window, The Third Floor, and The Flip.
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