AI Is Inevitable and Looks Like Jared Leto

"When you sit back and take them all in together, the Tron movies aren't a cohesive series so much as they're like a set of artifacts about the gradual demise of technological optimism. That initial 1982 feature, in all its Day-Glo eight-bit glory, was about a battle over authorship - the triumph of a visionary coder over the less talented C-suite member who stole his work. That it also happened to be about a program that developed self-awareness was secondary"

"to renegade software engineer Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) being transported inside a computer system and literally beating VP Ed Dillinger (David Warner) at his own game. By the 2010 follow-up Tron: Legacy, Kevin had transformed into a sage trapped in cyberspace, a remnant of the hippie-techie intersection out of which Silicon Valley culture sprung. His Zen talk now masked his indecision, and he'd been supplanted by an unsettling, de-aged digital doppelgänger hellbent on a campaign of conquest and the Tron equivalent of ethnic cleansing."

"And now we have Tron: Ares, in which there are two CEOs battling it out for the soul of humanity; the one who charges ahead with the development of artificial intelligence while hoping the result will turn out to be benevolent is the good CEO. That's as upbeat a vision of what's to come as we can ask for, I guess: Acceptance of AI is mandatory, but if we're lucky, it will like us - and by the way, it's going to look like Jared Leto."

The Tron films portray a steady erosion of technological optimism across three decades. The 1982 original frames a conflict over authorship in a neon digital world, where coder Kevin Flynn defeats a corporate rival while programs gain self-awareness. Tron: Legacy transforms Flynn into a trapped sage and introduces a de-aged digital antagonist driven to conquer. Tron: Ares centers on competing CEOs racing to dominate artificial intelligence and normalizes acceptance of AI while questioning its benevolence. The film casts Jared Leto as an advanced security program and pits Dillinger Systems against ENCOM, tying humanity's fate to corporate and defense interests.

Read at Vulture