Arnold Schwarzenegger in 'The Terminator.' Orion Pictures Corporation/Courtesy Everett Collection Curious about the coming AI apocalypse? Wondering exactly how that cute little chatbot that’s been eagerly helping you write emails and plan vacations is going to wipe out humanity in a species-ending holocaust sometime over the next decade? You know, the way all those Anthropic and DeepMind researchers have lately been telling us it would — or at least giving it a greater than 10 percent chance?
Well, we’ve got answers because Hollywood has been there, done that.
In fact, films and TV shows have been imagining super-intelligent algorithms taking over the world — or destroying it — since the days when the smartest thing you could do with a computer was spell the word BOOBS on a calculator.
Here is a brief history of AI ending the world as we know it, at least as depicted on screens.
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Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970)
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection This little-remembered sci-fi thriller, made back when bell-bottoms and sideburns were all the rage, pretty much invented the AI-takes-over-the-world genre. Directed by Joseph Sargent, who would later go on to make The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, it stars Eric Braeden as a scientist who builds a supercomputer to control America’s nuclear arsenal. Bad idea. Colossus hooks up with its Soviet counterpart and starts issuing orders through a creepily synthesized Speak-and-Spell-style electronic voice. There’s no happy ending, at least not for humans: the machine ultimately enslaves the planet.
