Strongly recommend watching ‘Metropolis (1927)’ if you’re into film history. It’s one of the oldest science fiction movies ever, and is still a good watch. It’s about a humanoid robot and an authoritarian government.
I saw it this week and was baffled by the insight and the scale of it.
> It’s about a humanoid robot and an authoritarian government.
you really think so? it's true that the government in the film was authoritarian, but the plight of the workers seemed far more salient than the structure of power that was keeping them in their place.
Spoilers: I found the movie's portrayal of a social conflict quite disappointing.
The movie goes as far as showing that oppressed workers will lash out in a violent protest, but then it deflects this anger towards the mad scientist, and the conflict kind of fizzles out? And I think it ends with the owner of the factory promising not to oppress them as much, and the owner's privileged son promising to upkeep this, basically reinforcing the existing social order.
Doing anything else would stray dangerously towards socialism, though, so as a product of its time it's understandable.
I found the conclusion closer to the 'class collaboration' ideology of Fascism.
Capital and labor are both dysfunctional in the movie, and this is portrayed in a typical socialist way: The upper classes are libertine, corrupt, inattentive, immoral. Labor is overworked, unrepresented, exploited.
However when labor tries to emancipate themselves from the oppressive and rigid order imposed, chaos ensues. They can't manage themselves correctly! So the ultimate solution is a synthesis. The classes stay in their positions (because this is the natural order) but conditions will be improved and so on
"natural order" argument reminds me how Aristotle describes a natural slave as "anyone who, while being human, is by nature not his own but of someone else" and further states "he is of someone else when, while being human, he is a piece of property; and a piece of property is a tool for action separate from its owner." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_slavery
"natural" does NOT mean good or that it is worth preserving.
Metropolis is actually about the fear of the mass industrialization and the class struggle. Fritz Lang was Austrian, but the movie was produced in Germany in a period were things were quite grim there.
The protagonist of Metropolis is in the title: Metropolis, the city, from the greek μητρόπολις, meter = mother, polis = city (or state).
Metropolis is proof that big, unsubtle Special Effects Pictures go back to the silent era.
The movie's Big Philosophical Statement is people should be nice to each other, but the visual effects were unmatched at the time and hold up well even now, assuming you find a good restoration. It's truly a marvel of its era, in every possible sense.
Welt am Draht also directly inspired the Matrix also-ran The Thirteenth Floor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirteenth_Floor). The Thirteenth Floor is not better than The Matrix as a cross-media series with a lot to say in later chapters, but I still think The Thirteenth Floor is a better whole movie than the first film called The Matrix. (Though I'm also in a weird minority that I think Matrix 2/3/4 are all individually better than the first film.)
Read the book. It has a very twisted bend on the movie. I saw the 13th floor on opening day... the theatre was empty and the movie was fantastic. D'Onforo played both roles brilliantly.
Also Colossus was filmed at Berkeley hall of science where I learned to program computers.
I didn't see eXistenZ until like a decade late, but that one also certainly has a twisted bend on the genre (for also being a contemporary of both 13th Floor and The Matrix).
I still don't understand how Roland Emmerich as "super Producer" after Stargate and Independence Day somehow managed to fail to get people into theater seats for 13th Floor. Someone at Sony screwed up that marketing. I don't even remember it playing in theaters, I found out about it on word of mouth in video rentals.
> I still don't understand how Roland Emmerich [...] somehow managed to fail to get people into theater seats for 13th Floor.
There were a lot of "are you living in a simulation?" film and television episodes that came out in 1998-2000. The Matrix was obviously the most successful, but Dark City (over a year earlier) had a similar theme. The X-Files episode "Field Trip" aired a few weeks after eXistenZ was in theatres, but a few weeks before The Thirteenth Floor was released. Etc.
I'm a fan of the genre, and I like all of the examples I've seen from that period (eXistenZ in particular), but I remember feeling at the time like it was just too much similar material in too short a period of time. I doubt Sony could have done anything to significantly change the box office numbers other than releasing it well before The Matrix.
It's still fascinating how much Dark City spent on sets, how poorly it did in the box office, and how quickly WB let The Matrix team ransack the sets. One of the factors in The Matrix's huge success at the time was that it was relatively cheap because of that leg up. It's one of the biggest visual differences between the first film and the sequels: the first film started from and benefited from Dark City's unique set design. (It's another thing I think makes the sequels better as movies because there was less aesthetic clash when the teams had full control of the sets and weren't just reusing/abusing great sets from a different team with an entirely different aesthetic design.)
I still have the game in the original box on my shelf - could not part with it when I gave away my DOS gaming collection - it was one of the games that made me think a lot as a teenager.
Watched this recently and was pleasantly surprised. I found it pretty gripping, and the 70s tech actually plays right into that. The communication with the computer via text is really well handled to build tension.
It was ok until they got to the point where Forbin tells the computer that he needs to sleep with the female engineer (who works for him) and that the computer can't listen in. That was very hokey and very 70s, I guess. Now it just sounds like sexual harassment.
They planned the whole idea out in a grassy area near the parking lot... why couldn't they just keep meeting out there to conspire?
The book has much worse terrible treatment of women than the movie. If I recalled correctly there was some plot point about the computer trying to understand human behavior related to sex I guess, so it sets up some terrible scenario.
I am a tremendous fan of this film and could never explain the frission I felt when Colossus and Guardian began their mutual acceleration. It's in that short list of cerebral, glacial science fiction of a particular era that somehow never lost your attention, like The Andromeda Strain and such.
Demon Seed is also up there but in a different way.
In principle impersonation is what "secret codes in a locked briefcase" defends against.
Given PAL was allegedly all zeroes at one point, I assume the secret codes have at various times been 12345 and the birthday of the then-sitting president's current mistress; if so, it's only helping in principle.
The "only the president can launch a nuclear strike" myth. If it was that easy you'd only need to blow up the White House with one nuke and take out America.
There are "continuity of operations" procedures to prevent a "decapitation" strike killing the President & VP, thus preventing the US from retaliating [0]. This was a plot point in Tom Clancy's novel Debt of Honor [1] (which I distinctly remember reading right before 911, as I had to commute via public transit and commutes were so long I read books).
I'd assume the VP has their own nuclear suitcase. Unless they're forced to choose a random number, this probably makes impersonation easier as it's n points of failure where n is the number of people who have their own nuclear suitcase.
At this point I pretty much imagine that some time in the future that you can be hooked to medical equipment and someone/something will state the following to you
"Do not think of the nuclear weapon pass phrase"
But you can't not think of it. The phrase clicks in your head and the electrical signals are picked up and decoded by the bedside computer. You've betrayed mankind. The nuclear war of the AI has begun.
> The phrase clicks in your head and the electrical signals are picked up and decoded by the bedside computer.
It wouldn't even have to click in your head if a brain scan could model your entire consciousness and then simulate every possible interrogation method until something works.
Even inputs that aren't currently possible for the body to report. Entire new levels of pain, intoxication, or anything.
The Machine Stops, 1909 by E M Forster (room with a view/Howard's end) could almost be a sequel to this. Ideas are often older than we think. (Short story/novela length. Not a gripping read but a nice quick length and interesting for the age)
Pretty good short story, I didn't know it was more than a century old. If you haven't read it yet, don't read the plot on Wikipedia, it spoils everything.
Colossus was a bit of a bore. If you want an exciting and somewhat prophetic film about an AI assistant I'd recommend Demon Seed (1977) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_Seed
It’s an awful film, IMO, and I’ve watched it about six times as it’s just so terrible it’s great. It’s a cult classic so cultish and classic that it’s neither cultish nor classic.
I mean, really, it’s the epitome of a 70’s psychosexual drama, draped in a sci-fi setting.
I always like to imagine it’s a prequel to D.A.R.Y.L., which is to the 80s what Demon Seed is to the 70s.
It’s comedy gold. I remember when Leo Laporte and Patrick Norton tried to riff on this on TechTV, I think it was a one-off special and not part of The Screen Savers, but not sure on that. It was somehow also awful, but in a good way. It’s a hard watch but not at all possible to take seriously cinematically, but thematically it’s horrific. The delivery in the film reminds me of The Room in parts, it’s that bad. And watching Leo and Patrick try to make it through (live?) was a layer cake of disgust and schadenfreude.
I’m not sure that this was ever repeated on TechTV, but I think they reran the special that weekend. I watched it again and it was just as bad and yet good upon rewatch. The line I quoted above by an egg-covered AI was matched by the truly horrific anti-women ending, and that part definitely worked thematically, as we the audience were supposed to be horrified, but I did not expect it to be so truly vile and graphic, and that part really was tough to watch and wasn’t funny at all, which maybe was intentional juxtaposition, now that I think about it?
Gonna check out D.A.R.Y.L. which is new to me.
Check out Murdercycle, it somehow has the same vibe and I think is one of the only live action productions that David Hayter, English voice actor of Solid Snake of Metal Gear Solid starred in. It’s awful. You’ll love it maybe.
Another older source for this sort of prediction is Samuel Butler's 1863 essay *Darwin among the Machines* in which Butler predicted that improvements in technology (which he compared to Darwin's then new idea of natural selection) would mean that machines would eventually surpass humanity. Butler later expanded this idea in his 1872 novel *Erewhon* in which a seemingly primitive culture is discovered by Westerners who later discover that the culture at one point had technology vastly superior to the West but abandoned it out of fear of where it was leading. Butler is the reason why Herbert named the "Butlerian Jihad" in Dune (although later an in-universe character was created)
Upvoted for Christopher Lambert, the B movie lover's action hero. If you haven't seen Fortress (1992) it's well worth your time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_(1992_film) (but nothing to do with AI)
The theme with so many of these movies is "once we created AI it is out of our control!", which I guess is a specific version of "humans and especially scientists shouldn't play God" angle. It always felt very… I dunno, ignorant of our own ability to maybe not do something?
Like, fear of "the singularity" is narratively appealing maybe, but it's ignoring that in the real world problems like climate change or enshittification through [whatever buzzword tech] are actually the result of constantly passively choosing to stay on a destructive path.
Is there any sci-fi in which all incoming disasters are perfectly or mostly preventable but the real problem is that people in power just choose to ignore it for their own short-sighted gain? Aside from "Don't Look Up", I mean.
At first glance it looks like people have agency, but I think very often the root cause is "system traps".
Enshittification happens because to a certain extent, the market demands that firms maximise returns. Companies that don't do this get weeded out.
Climate change is a challenging co-ordination problem because nobody wants to tank their economy more than they have to, there's no real enforcement for "cheats" and even agreeing on an accounting basis is politically fraught. Politicians that don't grant concessions to powerful existing vested interests are less electable.
AI safety is predictably going to be a secondary priority when competition gets tight.
Enshittification happens because the people who own and run the "markets" have decades of practice using them as an excuse for their entirely self-serving choices.
They're closely associated with the econo-political concept of There Is No Alternative.
The choices which benefit them personallyare catastrophic for most of the population in the short term (see today's news about insulin prices for one tiny example) and will be catastrophic for absolutely everyone in the longer term.
Climate change is enshittification on a planetary scale.
If someone went around setting fire to rows of houses it wouldn't take long for them to be jailed.
For some reason when corporations do the same to the planet it's "economics" and "market forces", and we're supposed to just accept it.
> Enshittification happens because to a certain extent, the market demands that firms maximise returns. Companies that don't do this get weeded out.
Do they really get weeded out? Do you have any examples of companies that went bankrupt because they insisted to stay consumer friendly rather than maximize returns?
Typical reasons companies go bankrupt are: failing to make a competitive product, betting on the wrong horse, or failing to adapt to change. In all three cases they can stay consumer friendly or not - it wouldn't matter.
Interestingly enough the issues you list seem related to capitalism rather than just any form of societal system.
Many literary utopias have non-capitalist systems but usually some sort of circular sharing system (some are outright communist, but others more slow living).
Greed must always be checked by a society. But since Calvinism we've had a dual moral reasoning (was that Charles Taylor or Hegel, can't recall). Through Calvinism capitalism attained the moral good of earning more than you need, to deploy greed for God.
Humans are naturally greedy (natural egoism is not immoral just a biological drive) and our political system should balance that out somehow.
> The theme with so many of these movies is "once we created AI it is out of our control!"
The movie only covers the first book of the original Colossus trilogy. The full theme of the books is a bit more complicated. We lose control of the machine, then gain it back only to be imperilled by an outside force, and finally make peace to work together with a machine struggling to understand its own existence just like us.
True. Although the trilogy as a whole is pretty problematic for a number of reasons. It's probably best enjoyed by reading the first book/watching the first film.
This is a theme in several John Wyndham stories -- I’m thinking Day of the Triffids and especially The Kraken Wakes.
He often seems to get looked down on today for writing “cosy catastrophes” about plucky English survivors, but his books have a lot more going on than that.
It dates back to us extrapolating from bad anthropology.
We used to think that what killed the Neanderthals was us - smarter and more competitive. The author of Lord of the Flies even wrote a book on it.
So when people were thinking about what might happen when something smarter than us existed, they imagined competition and an existential threat.
Turns out that the Neanderthals and homo sapiens cohabitated for thousands of years, had cross cultural exchange, were buried together, had families together, and that what most likely killed the Neanderthals was an inability to adapt to climate change and pandemics (in fact, severe COVID illness today is correlated to Neanderthal genes).
And yet the anchoring bias remains, and it seems many are more frightened of what something smarter than us might mean for our continued existence than they seem to be about our own future ability to adapt to climate change and pandemics.
It'd be refreshing to see Sci Fi in the next few years finally shed the bad futurism around AI we've been carrying forward for decades.
> Turns out that the Neanderthals and homo sapiens cohabitated for thousands of years, had cross cultural exchange, were buried together, had families together, and that what most likely killed the Neanderthals was an inability to adapt to climate change and pandemics (in fact, severe COVID illness today is correlated to Neanderthal genes).
would love to read more from your sources. i know that the theory of raw intellectual superiority has fallen out of favor and read some recent suggestions that Homo sapiens’ ability to coordinate and cooperate may have been a large factor in their success. that felt a bit hand-wavy and anachronistic to me but some of the findings also seemed worth exploring. i’m interested in the sources that identify information exchange and the genome (especially the parts
where you mention that the specifically the Neanderthal genome was identified as susceptible to pandemics/severe Covid illness).
> It'd be refreshing to see Sci Fi in the next few years finally shed the bad futurism around AI we've been carrying forward for decades.
“the creator” almost tries to get there but still leans heavily on the traditional fear dynamics in order to advance much of the plot. just not sure we know how to weave a compelling story without reducing AI to soulless servants or existential threat.
Don’t we already have this in the Star Wars universe? Many droids are apparently self-aware and autonomous. The need for restraining bolts indicates biological species feel a need to suppress that autonomy now and then.
Of course, one of the problems with Star Wars is that the biologicals always seem to regard the droids as servants. Since droids harm biologicals all the time, there doesn’t seem to be a “three laws” regime in place. Why have the droids apparently never rebelled? Why was there no Butlerian Jihad?
I know Star Wars is science fantasy, not science fiction, and there are many places where my whole premise can (and probably does) break down. Nonetheless AI and humans seem to get along pretty well.
You are thinking of the (now non-canon) book Tales of the Bounty Hunters. IG-88's story "Therefore I Am: The Tale of IG-88" has this as part of its plot. There were 3 different IG-88s, one of which took over droid production on Mechis 3 (the main droid production planet in the Empire), embedding something like "Order 66" in every droid produced. After relocating itself into the computer core of this fully operational battle station, it was about to transmit the code to start the droid revolution but was destroyed by pesky rebels.
One of the things that emphasize the horror of enslaving all those droids would be the repair manual of the Millennium Falcon[1] with 3 separate droid brains imprisoned inside it. One of whom, L3-37 was a droid liberationist herself[2].
I get your point that things don't have to go certain ways.
However, there are plenty of systems where the a giant and real pubic good isn't fought for because the "good" is highly distributed and the "bad" which kills it has highly concentrated profits for a few folks.
These are systematic issues because the massive of folks who are passively harmed have a difficult or impossible time "choosing otherwise" or fighting back or whatever because there are som many divergetn bad actors that are operating on them.
The only way to avoid that is to make changes to the underlying system in which it is more difficult to concentrate the outcomes for a few people, but very few people I know are wanting to institute those kinds of changes, as they are correct in understanding that fact as broadly anti-capitalist.
That's neither here nor there- even if you can't accept that political stance, the trope of "incoming disasters [which] are perfectly or mostly preventable but the real problem is that people in power just choose to ignore it for their own short-sighted gain" is literally everywhere.
Dr. Stangelove can be understood this way, though for "MAD" rather than climate change. The "Aliens" films (especially the second one) can be understood that way. Hell, "Who Framed Rodger Rabbit" can be read that way, but for public transportation.
"I just wanna make this cool tech so I will ignore how it impacts other people because I see the short term benefits" is literally everywhere in this culture.
If someone could make $2MM releasing skynet and knew it would end up with the entire plots of the first three Terminator films occurring I have zero doubt someone would do it.
I don't think we, in general, are "ignorant of our own ability to maybe not do something?" I think most of us have a very realistic understanding of how the people who unleash their technology into our shared ecosystem have worked historically.
(minor spoiler alert)
The language that the systems concoct - if only someone in the film's production crew had fleshed it out - so that we could see it now, and grok it, and (ofc) evaluate it critically.
Colossus, the film, was based on the first book in a trilogy.
It seems that by the Act III mankind does indeed prefer the benevolent guidance of Colossus.
Like the aliens that arrive in "Childhood's End", I sort of look forward to our AI overlords. (Looks over at war in Israel.) We seem incapable of managing ourselves.
There is no future where AI manages us free of human control. Instead, humans will leverage AI to oppress their fellow man with heretofore unimaginable efficiency.
There are plenty of futures where different factions of AI owners have fight AI against other AI leading to rapid evolution of said AI beyond our control.
I saw it this week and was baffled by the insight and the scale of it.