In the early 1970s film Colossus: The Forbin Project, a self-aware defense computer announces, "I bring you peace..." and detonates two ICBMs inside their silos as a warning against human interference. For more than fifty years, popular culture has portrayed computer sentience alternately as savior and nemesis, reflecting both hopes and fears about AI. Many AI narratives function as high-tech retellings of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, where scientists create entities that spiral out of control. These tales differ from robot stories, which focus on individual mechanical beings; AI stories typically involve humanity creating intelligences that surpass human cognition.
"This is the voice of World Control," a metallic, nonhuman baritone blared from a spherical speaker atop a bank of computers. "I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content, or the peace of unburied death." The men and women in the room-the greatest minds in the American scientific establishment-froze in horror. The computer, a defense system that had become self-aware after gaining control of the world's nuclear weapons, continued:
AI is one of the great hopes, and great fears, of the 21st century, but for more than 50 years, popular culture has been wrestling with the idea of computer sentience as both savior and nemesis. In movies, television shows, and literature, how AI has been portrayed reveals not only what we want from this technology, but also what we fear in ourselves.
In a sense, almost all AI stories from the past half century or so are high-tech retellings of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: Irresponsible scientists create something that gets out of control and threatens to destroy us all. These tales are different from stories about robots. In most science fiction, robots are individuals: They are sometimes helpmates, such as the kindly mechanical crew member from the original Lost in Space, or sly enemies, such as the cyborg seductress in Fritz Lang's Metropolis.
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