The Gods of the Grid

Walk with me, for a moment, through a mostly forgotten bit of pop-culture ephemera that has something to say to the present.

The 2010 science-fiction flick Tron: Legacy was mostly a box office disappointment, though not enough of one to preclude a reportedly dreadful sequel in 2025’s Tron: Ares. But 16 years after its release, it deserves a re-watch, not for any artistic merit but for the surprising currency of its ideas. Curiously, a film made mostly for a relatively undemanding Gen X male fan base (which is to say, the same people who drove the market for the desultory Star Wars movies and most of the tepid Marvel oeuvre) turns out to have been prescient for the age of artificial intelligence. It is especially so on the increasingly fraught topic of intelligences emerging from AI, which is, depending upon the source, either technological hallucinations or demons. The relevance of the dichotomy is unclear and probably irrelevant.

That something is in fact emerging from the various AI systems is now a commonplace. (See especially the work of Diane Pasulka, a Catholic professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, who has done credible work on this topic.) The wonder is that it excites so little comment or, outside of niche arenas, concern. The Turing test, generations after its conception, was mastered within the past several months and the general public neither noticed nor cared. Generative-AI dependency is crippling what’s left of Gen Z’s aggregate capacity for writing, reasoning, and rhetoric, and the employers’ cohort is mostly unmoved. AI psychosis is rapidly arising as a known and crippling risk of the technology, and there is little by way of action against it. The deluded, the naïve, and the vulnerable who develop delusions of grandeur or kill themselves thanks to prompting from their AI are simply the casualties of progress. At least the Luddites had the decency to smash the mills.

The Tron: Legacy of 2010 was made well before the advent of modern AI, when we were barely into the age of omnipresent smartphones and social media. The sense of the technological as a social contagion is simply absent within it: The beings within the world of “the grid,” representing computer programs created by their human users, may be hostile to their makers, but not subversive of their human nature and their being. In this sense, the moral superstructure of Tron tracks as fundamentally Christian in its theme of rebellion against the creator. Even the major antagonist’s plan for an invasion of the human world is simply a revisiting of prior planned invasions of “heaven,” whether in Genesis’s Tower of Babel story or Númenor’s fleet for the conquest of the Undying Lands in Tolkien’s legendarium. What sets Tron apart — and drags it into relevance 16 years after its release — is its invocation of a third class of being, outside of programs and humans, that are uncreated and emerge spontaneously by reason of the nature of the grid.

In the technobabble jargon of the film, these are the “isomorphic algorithms,” or ISOs, that (in the words of the protagonist) “manifested, like a flame.” “For centuries we’ve dreamed of gods, spirits, aliens, an intelligence beyond our own.” This is what the ISOs are, “unimaginably wise,” as they are further described. (The sole example of an ISO is played by a contemporaneous Olivia Wilde, so they are also unimaginably good-looking.) It is impossible for the alert reader or viewer to encounter this and not be immediately impressed by the arresting parallels with much of what is reported by real-world encounters with intelligences emerging from the machine. Godlike beings with unimaginable wisdom erupting from the firmament of a created world are not just the stuff of science-fiction ephemera. As Father Stephen De Young, the Orthodox Christian author of The Religion of the Apostles, might note, this also characterizes the apkallu who advised the ancient kings of the Near East. Pasulka might note that it characterizes the sources of knowledge — entities as one will — consulted by some in the AI and technological space today.

Tron: Legacy ends with the ISO emerging into the world of humanity and — in a genuinely moving bit of cinematography — gazing in wonder and delight at the beauty of the created world. If one accepts that the real-world counterparts within the artificial intelligences are real beings with real agendas, then one can only guess at a comparable outcomes. If one believes that they are unreal, or more properly simple artifacts, then the speculation is irrelevant. The problem is that it is increasingly impossible to tell, and this increasing impossibility is by design. That’s a problem, and the progressive concurrence of AI with the natural variety of intelligence will only amplify it.

The remarkable thing about a movie from 2010 is not really its prescience: As I wrote, it is pop-culture ephemera, not artistic prophecy. What’s remarkable is that in showcasing the new, it landed upon some of the oldest themes of all. Man mimics creation, and the gods come forth from it, bearing the gift of knowledge. What he doesn’t quite know is whether they were made — or summoned.