The topic of who should be the next James Bond once Daniel Craig inevitably hangs up his suit is certainly a contentious one. There are also calls to finally diversify the character for the first time, and make 007 either an actor of colour or even cast a female into the title role (although producers are against this latter idea). It’s a debate that humans could spend many an hour arguing over, which is why it might be a good idea to instead get some help from our robot overloads and get a machine-learning algorithm to help us decide instead.
Largo.ai (via MSN) has done just that, where they looked at certain characteristics of actors and compared them to that of Bond to determine who would be the best fit for the role. And when focused on British actors – given the obviousness Britishness of the actor – Henry Cavill won with a score of 92.3%, followed by Richard Armitage (The Hobbit films, 92%) and Idris Elba (90.9%). Ironically, Cavill was himself previously considered for the role back in 2005 before he ultimately lost out to Craig in the end. He would certainly make a great addition to the Bond suit, though I think more people may be rooting for Elba to give us a black Bond for a change (something I would certainly get behind). You can’t really fault any of those three choices though so this AI may just know what it is talking about.
When the algorithm expanded its search amongst international actors, Karl Urban won out with 96.7%, followed by Chris Evans on 93,9% and Will Smith at 92.9%. However, if the algorithm was to include women into the mix, The Mandalorian’s Gina Carano comes out on top at 97.3% ahead of both Cavill and Urban, followed by Katee Sackhoff (94.4%) and Angelina Jolie (94.2%).
What do you make of the results? Based on the results, it’s hard to argue with the ML algorithms in play here, though you could just as easily argue that perhaps these results were so obvious that we didn’t really need them at.
Last Updated: September 4, 2020
Credit: Google News
