Dietmar Fischer

And nudging, if done at scale, can become power.

That is why Metropolis still matters.

Not because Fritz Lang predicted ChatGPT, because he obviously did not.

But because he understood something older and deeper.

Whenever a society builds powerful machines, the most important question is not only what the machine can do, it is what the machine allows humans to do to each other.

Before we go further, a small practical note.

If you want all episodes of A Beginner's Guide to AI delivered straight to your mailbox, you can subscribe at beginnersguide.net.

That way the AI knowledge comes to you, instead of you wandering through the internet like a confused Victorian ghost looking for a decent search result.

So let's step into the city of Metropolis, towering skyscrapers above, exhausted workers below, and in the middle, a robot pretending to be human.

A century-old film asking a question that every business, every marketer, every founder and every normal person using AI should still ask today.

When machines learn to imitate us, who benefits from the imitation?

The machine in human clothing.

The main idea today is simple.

Metropolis is not really about robots.

It is about power wearing a robot costume.

In the film, the robot Maria is not built to help people.

She is built to copy a trusted woman and manipulate the workers.

That is the important AI lesson.

The danger is not that the machine has a metal body.

The danger is that it can borrow a human face, a human voice and human trust.