WORD VIRUS: Artificial Intelligence and Robots in Movies

The 8 Evil Forms of AI That Gave Robots a Bad Name

It's not the hardware that makes the evil robot one of western culture's most powerful myths. It's the software—namely the artificial intelligence—that turns machines into monsters. Here is a timeline with the most iconic examples of malevolent AI and the fears each inspired.

January 28, 2010 12:00 AM

Whether it's built from steel plate and circuit boards or slabs of reanimated flesh, if a robot has artificial intelligence, according to the cultural myth, that machine has the ability to be a monster. Sometimes the AI's problem is that it's not intelligent enough, triggering murderous glitches as in the legendary Golem of Prague or Robocop's ED-209 armed security bot. More often the threat of AI is its dark brilliance, from the blackmail scheme concocted by Frankenstein's self-loathing monster to the grotesque battery-slave camps of The Matrix. The fear of AI is different from concerns over genetic modification, self-replicating nanobots or other potentially slippery technological slopes, says Patrick Lin, an assistant professor of philosophy at California Polytechnic State University, who is developing ethical guidelines for robots for the United States Navy. "With robots, there's this unconscious projection of our own fears and evils, and our ability to deceive people and be immoral, onto these machines," Lin says. "If we're creating machines that are basically replicants, we know what kind of animals we are. We're the limiting factor. So the hypothetical question is, ‘Are machines really going to behave any better than us?'"

Although fantasies of robo-fascism continue to be recycled and refined in modern science fiction (thank you, Battlestar Galactica), by the end of the 20th century, the mythos was complete. While Japan's Astro Boy-inspired love affair with all things robotic shows no signs of cooling, western media continue to drop casual references to Skynet, the Matrix and the inevitable slaughter of mankind into coverage of even the most sober robotics research. As secular myths go, the evil machine has proven to be particularly hard to kill. Here are the villains that started it all, pop culture's most iconic examples of malevolent AI, along with the fears that their fictional crimes inspired.

Golem of Prague (1600's)

Crimes: Manslaughter
Taught us to fear: Unstable artificial intelligence

In folk tales dating back to the 17th century, the Golem of Prague was sculpted from river mud and animated with magic, but its design is robotic to the core—big, impossibly strong, and lacking free will and emotions. It was created as a protector, patrolling Prague and foiling plots to frame Jews for gruesome crimes. Its AI is also familiar in its limitations: The Golem floods a house when no one tells it stop fetching water, and mindlessly fishes all day because no one tells it when to quit. In later versions of the myth, potentially influenced by the hugely popular Frankenstein, the Golem loses its mind. The proto-robotic superhero goes on an inexplicable killing rampage until its creator shuts it down for good.

Frankenstein's Monster (1818)

Crimes: Murder
Taught us to fear: Artificial genius

Forget Victor Frankenstein's hubris, his hunch-backed minion, Igor, and Boris Karlov's moaning shamble—the novel, Frankenstein, was a sensation because of its radiant monster; a doomed, romantic sociopath whose whip-smart mind became his undoing. The monster learns to speak and read in months, and soon resents his almost-human body and the creator who abandoned him. If there's any doubt as to why critics call this the world's most influential evil-robot story, consider the central plot point: Frankenstein refuses to build a mate for the monster, fearing a superior, malevolent race that would destroy mankind. Score one for the humans.

Radius (1921)

Crimes: Genocide, Treason
Taught us to fear: Organized robotic insurrection

Like the Golem and Frankenstein's monster, the robots of the play, Rossum's Universal Robots, or R.U.R., are flesh and blood creations, and murderers. The difference is scale: the R.U.R.s are mass-produced from factory-grown organs, and instead of a brief killing spree, they succeed in wiping out the human race. The first inkling of this rebellious streak comes from the robot leader Radius, who doesn't mince words, saying, "I wish to have no master . . . I wish to be the master of people."

The Machines (1950)

Crimes: Insider Trading, Treason
Taught us to fear: A less deadly, but more secretive machine insurrection

Science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov abhorred melodrama and the growing robot anxiety of the 1940's and 1950's, but couldn't resist depicting an insidious AI takeover. In his 1950 short story, "The Evitable Conflict," (later collected in the book, I, Robot) the Machines are granted control of the world economy. In their artificial wisdom, these overzealous AIs decided to induce occasional failures to boost the greater economic good. Hollywood eventually supplied the melodrama, turning the quiet financial coup into the mass house arrest of mankind in the 2003 action movie I, Robot.

HAL 9000 (1968)

Crimes: Murder, Mutiny
Taught us to fear: AI-controlled systems

The warning signs should have been obvious: the singsong condescension in HAL 9000's voice, and that baleful red eye. But by the time 2001: A Space Odyssey leaps from sci-fi to horror, it's too late—the AI exerts its control over a Jupiter-bound spacecraft quickly, smothering or jettisoning the human crew members whom it considers to be a liability to the mission. Like Asimov's Machines, HAL isn't malicious or petty, just a little too smart for the good of humans

T-800 / Skynet (1984)

Crimes: Genocide, treason
Taught us to fear: Networked, self-organizing AI

Skynet never appears on-camera in The Terminator, but the movie's eponymous enforcer bears its message: The planet's not big enough for both biological and artificial intelligence. We also don't see Skynet, an advanced defense computer, becoming self-aware, using its Pentagon access to trigger a nuclear holocaust and then building its army of autonomous killing machines to mop up the survivors. Instead, the movie shows the smoldering aftermath of a war with the machines, and gives an old myth its most powerful update.

ED-209 (1987)

Crimes: Manslaughter
Taught us to fear: Armed, autonomous robots

In Robocop, ED-209 has the cognitive powers of a very smart guard dog and the firepower of an attack chopper. And like dogs trained for violence, ED-209 sometimes bites the wrong person—in one of the movie's most memorable scenes, the security bot botches its own sales demo by gunning down an unarmed civilian. Years later, the debate over the level of autonomy in real-life armed robots is still going strong. ED-209 is also a prime example of another Hollywood stereotype: the robot buffoon, whose errors can be tragic, or, as with the antics of the Separatist droid army in the Star Wars prequels, downright zany. In ED's case, the robot is menacing, until it's knocked over, at which point it emits whimpering dog noises and thrashes around in a tantrum.

The Machines (1999)

Crimes: Forced Labor, Genocide, Torture
Taught us to fear: Everything in The Terminator, plus robot slavers

Never mind the fuzzy math behind harnessing human body heat for power—the Machines of the 1999 film, The Matrix, (not to be confused with Asimov's Machines) are a deliriously twisted race of AIs. They turn prisoners into battery packs, craft vast virtual worlds to keep us occupied, and, as evidenced by the black-suited Agent Smith, are capable of abject hatred. The real horror of The Matrix (aside from the sequels) is the prospect of machines not only conquering mankind, but torturing and toying with our defeated species.

via popularmechanics.com