Christopher Nolan, James Cameron and others have long explored AI in films. Here are eight that strikingly foretell the tech’s consequences
As AI takes over the world in the metaphorical sense – for now, at least – it is the perfect time to turn to the films that have depicted AI over the years, and what they have said about the world in the process. Here is a selection that have given AI a robust presence in popular culture over the past few generations.
1. The Terminator
James Cameronrecently said, “I warned you guys in 1984, and you didn’t listen.” Cameron’s dystopian science fiction series – particularly the 1984 original and its
1991 sequel, both with Arnold Schwarzenegger– imagined a future world where a military computer system named Skynet grows sentient and, after humans try to “pull the plug”, starts a nuclear holocaust.
“They say it got smart,” John Connor’s father says in the original film. Ever since, The Terminator has loomed as perhaps the pre-eminent cinematic vision of a world leading to AI rule.
2. 2001: A Space Odyssey
2001: A Space Odyssey–
Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 masterworkthat envisioned a human history in which the creation of tools, from ape bludgeon to gleaming space station, has evolutionary consequences.
HAL, the red-eyed antagonist voiced with disquieting calm by Douglas Rain, is technically a child. (It tells the astronaut Dave that it is nine years old.) HAL can easily win at chess and read lips. But much of what HAL is up to remains hidden behind its opaque machine exterior, and in deep space, it begins maliciously eliminating the astronauts on board its ship. Maybe HAL would have got along better with Siri or Alexa.
3. Wall-E
For a kids’ movie, the future offered up by Wall-E (2008) is remarkably haunting: an Earth destroyed by pollution as a lazy human race locked to their screens and stuck in their La-Z-Boys has passed all thinking on to computers.