Hail Mary, Full Of Grease
The hero of Project Hail Mary does things no lone scientist ever could-unless he brought along something like an Al coding agent. That's the hopeful vision of Al.
Watching the latest Andy Weir adaptation, Project Hail Mary, I was struck by something profoundly hopeful and empowering.
A standard mechanic in hero movies is that no matter what the actual expertise or background of the hero, they can obviously tackle complex science or engineering problems in totally unrelated domains. In Independence Day, for example, David Levinson, who is fully a satellite technician for a cable company, manages to whip up a computer virus that runs natively on alien hardware. The Tony Starks and Jack Ryans on the screen never have the slightest trouble expertly one-shotting solutions in areas they have no business knowing anything about (and always under time pressure).
And we forgive this in the movies because ... well, they’re movies. It’s a macguffin, don’t think about it too hard.
In Hail Mary, Ryan Gosling’s character (Grace) follows suit. He’s a junior high school teacher, exiled from the world of biology research, who finds himself alone in space. And after initially freaking out and rejecting the mantle of hero, he comes to embrace it over the course of the movie, and we’re rooting for him.
We’re rooting for him so hard, in fact, that we barely notice when he does things that a former academic biologist (even a very clever, handsome one) would never, ever be able to do. Like:
Creating a linguistic translation model for a non-human species from scratch
Reprogramming flight software for probes in a way that will send them many light years away with inconceivably precious biological cargo
Manufacturing tools and parts out of xenonite, a material invented by someone else’s civilization.
Even if you grant that he came equipped with some cool near-future technologies, and that Rocky did a lot of heavy lifting, it still doesn’t add up. Any one of those things that Grace did on his own would take teams of the most expert humans working for months on the engineering problem to even have a hope of coming close. It’s just not believable.
Unless! Unless one of the technologies he brought with him from Earth was a future version of something like an AI Coding Agent: an engineering sidekick who understands what you’re trying to do and can fill in all the details to implement what you’re asking for—writing code, creating prototypes and materials with robotic appendages, and working out all the test cases and alternatives, with your feedback to keep it moving in the right direction.
Imagine the prompt:
OK, I need to create a sophisticated model to start to understand Rocky’s language. Let’s build some realtime translation software for it. Make me a harness that records what he’s saying and I’ll give indications of what I think he means. Draw on humanity’s best linguistics research and maintain a suite of statistically possible translation paths, getting better over time.
Or:
Hey, we need to send these Beetle probes home to Earth on their own. Build some simulations of what might happen and what onboard software and hardware changes are needed for them to make the journey in the most resilient-yet-fast way possible.
We don’t see him doing this, outright. The computer doesn’t even have a fun name like “Claude” or “Siri”. But you can imagine that this is what he’s actually doing—in fact, that in this future, this is just something everyone does, and it’s common knowledge. Not a fancy hyped up “AI”; it’s just how building stuff works. Your intent stays in the foreground, you engage with ideas and intents ... and machine intelligence fills in the details, checks the math, etc.
This is the part I find empowering and hopeful. When some people think about the role of AI in our lives, it’s in the frame of “replacement”, dulling our mental faculties and making us dumb. But this vision is a radically different one: the idea that capabilities like this might be an integral, quiet part of our lives, allowing us to do MUCH bigger things with machine intelligence as a tool. Science and engineering only get more complicated over time; to live on the cutting edge, where no single human can master everything at an expert level, we have the opportunity to adjust our altitude and wield machine intelligence as a tool in the background.