Mission: Impossible 7 Terrified President Biden - But The Truth Is Even Scarier

While any filmmaker will tell you the goal of their movies is to first and foremost entertain their audiences, there's no question that a film like "Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One" can be unnerving as well — especially considering the doomsday scenario it presents.

In fact, the seventh film in producer-actor Tom Cruise's "Mission: Impossible" series was so convincing in its presentation of the dangers of artificial intelligence that it frightened U.S. President Joe Biden.

In "Dead Reckoning," Ethan Hunt (Cruise) assembles his Impossible Mission Force team to locate two halves of a key that, when interlocked, become the only means of stopping The Entity, a dangerous AI system that has become self-aware and gone rogue. However, the IMF isn't the only party searching for both halves of the key. Countries across the globe are also seeking it as a means to dominate the world if they come into possession of it.

According to The Associated Press, Bruce Reed, deputy chief of staff at the White House, watched "Dead Reckoning" during a weekend retreat with the president, who was haunted by the very real threat of AI that he saw in the film.

"If he hadn't already been concerned about what could go wrong with AI before that movie, he saw plenty more to worry about," Reed told The AP.

Of course, "Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One" isn't the first film to examine the perils of AI. Among the most notable is the self-aware computer gone rogue, HAL 9000, which is at the heart of director Stanley Kubrick's 1968 classic, "2001: A Space Odyssey." Then, beginning in 1984, writer-director James Cameron gave a chilling look at the aftermath of the rise of the AI-powered Skynet, which eradicated Earth's human population, in his Terminator film franchise.

Nearly 40 years after the release of the first Terminator film, the dangers of AI are still being addressed in cinema, perhaps more now than ever. Following the premiere of director Christopher McQuarrie's "Dead Reckoning" in July, filmmaker Gareth Edwards explored the fallout of a purported nuclear detonation by AI in "The Creator," which hit theaters in September.

And while President Joe Biden has noted that the use of AI is not all bad, he said important steps must be taken to avoid its perils before things get out of hand. As such, Biden signed his "Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence" on October 30.

"Artificial Intelligence must be safe and secure," the president wrote in his Executive Order. "Meeting this goal requires robust, reliable, repeatable, and standardized evaluations of AI systems, as well as policies, institutions, and, as appropriate, other mechanisms to test, understand, and mitigate risks from these systems before they are put to use. It also requires addressing AI systems' most pressing security risks — including with respect to biotechnology, cybersecurity, critical infrastructure, and other national security dangers — while navigating AI's opacity and complexity."

While the AI system in "Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One" presented a compelling enough scenario to shake even President Joe Biden, thankfully there's less to worry about in reality. Distributed AI Research Institute Director of Research Alex Hanna told The Washington Post, "It's absurd," when asked if the Entity in the film mirrors the actual capabilities of AI.

"The idea that the Entity can hack into basically any electronic system — that it can listen and see everything happening in the world and learn from it — is pretty ridiculous," she said. "None of the current AI technologies can do this autonomously. The Entity has such foresight that it can predict who is going to do what in the future down to the second, and game every possibility with humanlike ingenuity. That's not possible."

Part of the problem, Hanna explained, is how magical AI's powers are portrayed in popular forms of media like movies. "Even in this 'Mission: Impossible' movie, the idea is once the good guys get a key to access the Entity's source code, the AI can be controlled. That's a misunderstanding. Even if you had the actual source code of an AI, it wouldn't tell you what you need to know. You'd also need the model weights in a neutral network to be able to replicate any of its decision-making. You would need to know which data it has access to."

Fans can experience the power of The Entity in "Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One" as it rolls out on home video.