It’s interesting that the Spider-Man universe (or multiverse, I guess) is studded with well-meaning villains. In my last movie review, we looked at Norman Osborn and his tragic transformation into the Green Goblin. What’s odd about his character is that he’s almost a father figure to Peter Parker throughout the film, offering support, guidance, wisdom. It’s the allure of a mysterious form of biotechnology and corporate pressure that sends him off the deep end.

It isn’t so different with the iconic Dr. Octopus.

An idealist set on inventing a new source of perpetual energy, Dr. Octavius is a friendly but ambitious scientist, who, like Osborn, takes Peter under his wing. The experiment to create a sustained fusion reaction, though, goes awry and would have destroyed New York City if Spider-Man hadn’t pulled the plug.

“The power of the sun in the palm of my hand,” Doc Ock muses right before the miniature sun starts to magnetically attract the metals in the room and surrounding area. Yet another Spider-Man villain entranced by the possibilities of technological power only to see their vision collapse.

Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 introduces another relevant gadget: artificial intelligence. The four mechanical arms Doc Ock uses to regulate the fusion reaction are advanced AIs, regulated by a neural link that gives him control over them. However, when the link breaks, the arms seem to become autonomous, even sentient. Thus a villain is born, controlled by the AI he created, set on recreating his experiment at all costs.

It’s a bit chilling when the AI arms “talk” to Octavius. While a self-governing AI system is farfetched, some futurists think the technology’s development in this area is inevitable. For instance, the CEO of Anthropic recently noted that advanced AI could start “self-replicating” as soon as 2025. (That’s next year, by the way.) Blake Lemoine, a former Google employee who has spoken at the COSM conference hosted by the Walter Bradley Center (which publishes Mind Matters) thinks that advanced AI is actually sentient. As Robert J. Marks has noted, though, AI isn’t conscious, and human beings have a kind of creativity and intelligence that even the most advanced computers simply won’t be able to emulate. However advanced AI gets, it will never have a soul.

In the end of the movie, though, Doc Ock gets the arms to listen to him, and comes back to his senses. That might be the striking image we need to see today: don’t let yourself be controlled by technology. Even when it seems like the chatbots are talking to you, remember there’s just an algorithm behind the screen, filled with sound and fury, signifying nothing.