When an AI rejects him for life insurance, Mitch wonders if he can escape his fate

After years of excessive alcohol consumption, an insurance company’s algorithm flags Mitch as too risky for life insurance. At first, he shrugs it off, but it slowly begins to send him into an existential crisis. What does it mean for a supposedly ‘objective’ data set to predict that you’re going to die early? Is it a fate you can escape? It might sound like the premise of a Black Mirror episode, but the experience was all-too-real for the US filmmaker Mitch McGlocklin. The incident inspired his celebrated and thought-provoking experimental short film Forever. Emphasising the feeling that his life has been reduced to data points, McGlocklin uses an animation technique that employs LiDAR technology, which AIs use to discern the human world. As a camera floats through a series of sparse digital environment, McGlocklin lands on an unexpectedly optimistic – and perhaps tongue-in-cheek – outlook on our increasingly data-defined times.