10 Fictional AIs Ranked by How Likely They Are to Kill Us All
“Mrs. Davis” is a whole new take on artificial intelligence: here’s a series that sees a heroine nun battling an artificial intelligence dreaming of world domination. (If you’re hearing about it for the first time, well, it’s on Peacock, so.) The show sort of pits faith against technology, though not quite as pedantically. Simone (Betty Gilpin) is a nun who exposes charlatans in her spare time, and in the first episode, an all-powerful AI (known as Mrs. Davis) tasks her with destroying the Holy Grail. But Simone blames Mrs. Davis for her father’s death and doesn’t trust the computer at all. Cue techno thrill.
Mrs. Davis is just the latest in a long line of tales of artificial intelligence going back centuries, from tales of sentient robots to all sorts of anthropomorphic animated objects, often brought to life by magic. These variations on a theme have tended to be parables, but as we get closer to creating artificial intelligence that could actually pass for a human, we come face to face with moral predicaments that no longer seem strictly hypothetical. Grammarly has been following our letter for several years now; now other AI tools are writing entire articles. Now that AI has been used to create a new song from Drake and The Weeknd , we’re getting closer to the day when those in power will start to seriously question whether they even need real human workers.
When this happens, we can’t say the movies didn’t warn us, although not all fictional AIs are malicious. Here are 10 movie and TV series AIs ranked by their likelihood of killing us all.
Interested party (2011—2016)
Recall the minority report , but with artificial intelligence replacing three naked soothsayers in a bathtub. Michael Emerson plays Harold Finch, a reclusive billionaire who designs and codes a system (simply referred to as “The Machine”) that collects enough information from global sources to predict terrorist attacks and identify potential criminals (the show begs the question: what if the richest in man was not completely useless in the world?). Operating, on a superficial level, like the sort of CBS police procedurals your parents love, the show (from Westworld creator Jonathan Nolan) asks some pretty smart questions about free will and privacy (while generally leaning on the security > free-of-argument side) . It’s more interesting than it has any right to be, given its relative success on network TV.
Level of Maliciousness: There are no real hints of the Machine’s sentience and everything is left largely up to the people… but we’ve seen what happens when law enforcement tries to anticipate crime and criminality. 5/10 .
Where to stream: Freevee
Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970)
Designed by Dr. Charles A. Forbin, Colossus is a computer system designed to manage the nuclear arsenals of both the United States and its allies. Buried deep in the mountains and using its own nuclear power source, the computer must be completely protected from any outside attack. Unfortunately, his own draconian defense logic leads him to conclude that humans are incapable of making their own decisions. More regrettably, the Soviet Union built a similar system, and the two computers decided they were on the same wavelength, declaring that humans could either have “a world of abundance and contentment, or the peace of unburied death.” Believing that freedom is an illusion anyway, the linked computers continue to take complete control of world affairs with a global nuclear arsenal to keep humans in line.
Malevolence Level: While Colossus is pretty much the villain in this installment, it’s never really clear that it’s wrong due to our inability to manage our own shit. 8/10 .
Where to broadcast: Digital rental
Update (2018)
Leigh Whannell, better known for his collaborations with James Wan on Saw and Astral , created an impressively smart action movie in Upgrade that is a bit like a cyberpunk John Wick, asking big questions about the wisdom of bringing AI into our lives. Everyday life. In the near future, artificial intelligence will be everywhere. The plot picks up when an AI-controlled vehicle malfunctions and crashes while AI-controlled drones watch the entire situation (not particularly distant scenarios from a 2023 perspective). Luckily for our severely injured protagonist, Gray, new technologies will soon hit the market: STEM, an implant that uses AI to take over the job of his severed spine… and something else. With newly enhanced powers, he seeks revenge on the people responsible for the accident that injured him and killed his wife. Without ever stepping back from the action, the film explores some complex territory regarding personal responsibility in our brave new world. Gray and STEM are becoming so intertwined that it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. In short, when we more consistently delegate decision making to machines, who is responsible when bad things happen?
Malevolence Level: STEM gets more and more vicious as the movie progresses, although everything he knows he learned from us. 7/10 .
Where to broadcast: Digital rental
Black Mirror : “Be Right Back” (2013)
Several episodes of the dystopian sci-fi anthology Black Mirror touch on artificial intelligence, but “Be Right Back,” which kicked off Season 2, asks especially timely questions. In this film, Martha Powell (Haley Atwell) mourns the unexpected death of her partner Ash (Downhill Gleason) when she learns of a service that recreates a virtual version of a deceased loved one using videos, photos, social media posts. essentially using our ever-larger digital footprints to reconstruct us when we’re gone. At first, she can chat with “Ash” on the phone, immersed in fantasies, but then the company promises a more “physical” option. Back in 2013, this might have seemed like a distant possibility, but the ubiquity of tools like ChatGPT has made things like this more than just possible: companies are already doing it , at least in its infancy. This is now inevitable and raises all sorts of difficult questions, the most troubling of which has to do with our worth as separate and finite individuals in a world where we can reproduce indefinitely. Would retreating into a second-rate fantasy version of a relationship be inhuman or completely normal if it makes us happy? Would you agree to the approach of a lost loved one, or would you like one of you to linger after your death? Better start thinking about our answer.
Level of Malevolence: Although his existence raises very disturbing questions, Ash himself seems to be completely kind. 3/10 .
Where to stream: Netflix
Supremacy (2014)
Transcendence isn’t a great movie on a story level, but it (mostly) plays fair with the real potential of AI, at least as it’s likely to be developed in the near future. Dying from polonium poisoning, a scientist (Johnny Depp) creates an image of his brain and consciousness to be uploaded to a computer, forming the basis of a new artificial intelligence system. The AI continues to create a kind of utopia in a small desert town as it comes into conflict with an anti-tech group. Transcendence postulates, in line with modern thinking about the real world, that something like a technological singularity will occur at some point in the future, when the exponential growth of self-replicating artificial intelligence will make our world unrecognizable… for better or for worse. .
Malevolence Level: The human AI in the film is mostly quite pleasant. 1/10 .
Star Trek: Discovery (2017—)
In the second season of Discovery , the team (led by soon to be singled out Captain Christopher Pike, played by Anson Mount) discovers that the AI running Starfleet’s intelligence operations, Control, is spiraling out of control, due in part to making a meat puppet out of a very dead intelligence chief. (Maybe they shouldn’t have called him “Control?”) A time traveler (Sonya Sohn of The Wire ) warns the Disco Gang that if given access to the data their ship has received, Control will eventually destroy nearly all sentient beings. creatures. life, a revelation that launches the ship and the series into their new status quo of the distant future. As a bonus, the phenomenal Michelle Yeoh gives the gang some time to escape by kicking the crap out of a reanimated villain, but that’s probably not a scenario that will do you any good when you’re thinking about the benefits and dangers of AI.
Level of Malevolence: Given Control’s use of reanimated corpses as part of a plan to wipe out all life everywhere, I’d say a solid 10/10 is fair.
Stream Where: Paramount+
She (2013)
In this Spike Jonze movie, Joaquin Phoenix plays a deeply introverted man whose job it is to write personal letters for people who struggle with this sort of thing. In the midst of a divorce, he meets Samantha, a new virtual assistant (a slightly newer concept in 2013), which he sets up with Scarlett Johansson’s voice (taking a job from a real AI, no doubt). Jonze uses a sci-fi scenario to explore the various complications and reshuffles of contemporary relationships (of which an increasing number are happening online) and also alludes to the problem of falling in love with someone who is only made to appear human, but who is very different. goals and motives. As real AI becomes more sophisticated, we will eventually have to deal with the consequences (for better or for worse) of developing an attachment to our near-future Siris and Alexas.
Malevolence Level: Offering some unsettling implications, Samantha never threatens openly. (This is one of the few studies of AI in pop culture that doesn’t at least hint at the end of civilization.) 2/10 .
Where to broadcast: Digital rental
Omniscient (2020—)
In near-future Brazil (where the series comes from), crime is virtually non-existent. Tiny autonomous drones are watching everyone almost all the time, and any offense is quickly documented and prosecuted by AI systems that determine exactly what crime has been committed and deliver a sentence. At least until the main character of the series, Nina Peixoto (Carla Salle), returns home and finds that her father was killed and someone’s drone did not turn on the alarm. There is no one to investigate, as crime is virtually non-existent and the company’s privacy protocols are such that it is almost impossible for Nina to access her father’s drone. The show addresses questions about whether privacy is worth sacrificing for security in a world where everything is outsourced to machines.
Level of Malevolence: Debatable, but the idea of drones following us and documenting everything not yet documented is creepy enough. 3/10.
Where to stream: Netflix
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Perhaps an obvious choice, but a necessary one. The HAL 9000 supercomputer (memorably personified as a single red camera lens) has never seemed to be exclusively or even primarily villainous, but it does kill a few people in an attempt to ensure the success of the Discovery One mission. Even with all that, HAL’s soft-spoken, childish demeanor makes it hard not to feel a hint of sympathy when he’s “killed” by Keira Dullea’s Dave Bowman. Like almost everything else in Kubrick’s film, there are many correct ways to interpret HAL’s role. I see it as a way to explore the limits of logic and the dangers of cold, inflexible reasoning in the face of human concerns. HAL also reminds us that an AI created in the image and likeness of humanity will only be as good as its software.
Level of Malevolence: The gentle nature of HAL is sympathetic, but also makes the computer’s cold-blooded actions all the more unsettling. 6/10 .
Where to stream: HBO Max
Black Mirror : “Black Museum” (2017)
Most episodes of Black Mirror are based on the idea that we are all villains and that the danger of technology lies not in the technology itself, but in how we will use it for our own selfish purposes. This episode, an anthology within an anthology, is unique in that it shows the real villain: Rolo Haynes (Douglas Hodge), who runs the museum of the same name. The vignettes presented to a visitor to the Nishu Museum (Letitia Wright) culminate in a visit to an exhibition about Clayton Lee (Babs Olusanmokun), a man convicted (due to a lot of conflicting evidence) of murder. On death row, he was approached by Rolo, who made a complete copy of his consciousness before being executed. Now Clayton (or rather, his fully sentient and intelligent copy) is forever sitting in the electric chair, and paying visitors have the opportunity to punish a (possibly guilty) person over and over again. It represents a different type of AI from the pure machine varieties in other stories, but Clayton’s AI makes us think about our responsibility to the increasingly human-like intelligence of the future and what happens to our already quirky morality when we can create humanoid avatars on which we can act out our most sadistic fantasies without consequences.
Malevolence level: Rolo Haynes, very human, the most disturbing figure here; AI Clayton is almost certainly the victim. 0/10 .
Where to stream: Netflix