In 2024, AI is making headlines each day. We may pay attention to the scientific evidence, but how will we imagine AI and our relationship with it today and in the long run? Fortunately, movies can provide us some insight.
Perhaps essentially the most famous AI in film is HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). HAL is an artificially intelligent computer aboard a spaceship that permits interstellar travel. The film was released lower than a yr before the moon landing. And yet, even with this optimism a couple of latest era of space travel, HAL's portrayal sounds a warning about artificial intelligence. His motives are ambiguous and he shows that he can turn against his human crew.
This Sixties classic illustrates fears which are common throughout the history of AI movies: that AIs can’t be trusted, that they may rebel against their human creators and check out to overwhelm or overthrow us.
These fears are contextualized in alternative ways in several historical periods – within the Nineteen Fifties they’re related to the Cold War, followed by the Space Race within the Sixties and Nineteen Seventies. Then within the Nineteen Eighties it was video games, and within the Nineties the Internet. Despite these different concerns, fear of AI stays remarkably consistent.
My latest research findings, which form the backbone of my latest book AI in filmexamined how “strong” or “human” AI is portrayed in film. I examined greater than 50 movies to see how they illuminate human attitudes toward AI – how we interpret and understand it through characters and stories, and the way attitudes have modified because the early days of AI.
Types of AI
The idea of AI was born in 1956 at an American summer Research Project Workshop at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, where a bunch of academics got here together to brainstorm ideas on the subject of “pondering machines.”
A mathematician named John McCarthy coined the term “artificial intelligence,” and no sooner had the brand new field of science been named than filmmakers began imagining human-like AI and what relationship we might need with it. That same yr, an AI, Robby the Robot, appeared within the movie Outer Space and returned the next yr in 1957 within the movie Invisible Boy to defeat one other variety of AI, this time an evil supercomputer.
AI as a malevolent computer resurfaced in 1965 as Alpha 60 in Jean-Luc Godard's chilling dystopia Alphaville, after which in 1968 with Kubrick's memorable HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
These early AI movies laid the groundwork for what was to follow. There were AIs with robotic bodies, and later robotic bodies that looked human—the primary of which appeared in 1973's Westworld, where a robot malfunction caused chaos and terror in a futuristic adult amusement park. Then there have been AIs that were digital, just like the evil Joshua within the 1977 horror film Demon Seed, through which a girl is impregnated by a supercomputer.
In the Nineteen Eighties, digital AIs began to be connected to networked computers, with computers “talking” to one another – an early type of what would later turn out to be the Internet. For example, a highschool student played by Matthew Broderick in “War Games” (1983) stumbled upon an AI when he almost by accident began a nuclear war.
From the Nineties onwards, an AI was capable of move between digital and material worlds. In the Japanese animated film Ghost within the Shell (1995), the puppeteer exists within the ups and downs of the Internet, but can inhabit “shell bodies”. Agent Smith in Matrix Revolutions (2003) takes over a human body and materializes in the true world. In Her (2013), the AI operating system Samantha finally moves beyond matter, beyond the “stuff” of human existence, and becomes a post-material being.
Mirror images, double images and hybrids
In the primary many years of AI film, AI characters mirrored human characters. In Collosus: The Forbin Project (1970), the AI supercomputer reflects and reinforces the boastful, over-ambitiousness of the inventor. In Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), Sarah Connor herself has turn out to be just like the AI Terminators of Skynet: her strength is her armor, and she or he hunts to kill.
In the 2000s, human and AI doppelgangers began to overlap and merge. In Spielberg's AI: Artificial Intelligence (2001), the AI ”son” David looks like an actual boy, while the true son Martin comes home from the hospital attached to tubes and wires that make him seem like a cyborg.
In Ex Machina (2014), the human Caleb tests the AI robot Ava, but in doing so questions his own humanity, examines his eyeball for digital traces and cuts his skin to make it bleed.
Over the last 25 years of AI film, the boundaries between human and AI, digital and material, have turn out to be permeable, emphasizing the fluid and hybrid nature of AI creations. And within the movies In The Machine (2013), Transcendence (2014), and Chappie (2015), the boundary between human and AI has eroded almost to the purpose of nonexistence. These movies present scenarios of transhumanism—through which humans can evolve beyond their current physical and mental limitations by harnessing the ability of artificial intelligence to upload the human mind.
Although these stories are invented and their characters are fictional, they vividly show what fascinates us and what frightens us. We are afraid of artificial intelligence and this fear doesn’t disappear in the flicks, although it has been questioned more in recent many years and more positive representations have been observed, resembling the little garbage-collecting robot in WALL-E. But above all, we’re afraid that they may turn out to be too powerful and check out to turn out to be our masters. Or we fear that they may hide amongst us and we is not going to recognize them.
But sometimes we also feel sympathy for them: AI characters in movies may be pitiful figures who want to be accepted by humans but never are. We are also jealous of them – of their mental abilities, their physical robustness and the incontrovertible fact that they don’t experience human death.
This fear and envy are linked to a fascination with AI that runs through your complete history of film – we see ourselves in AI creations and project our emotions onto them. Sometimes they’re enemies of humans, sometimes uncanny mirror images and sometimes even human-AI hybrids – the movies about AI of the last 70 years show the inextricable intertwining of human-AI relationships.
