Today is Halloween and which day would be better suited to once again show the best movies that made many a horror scenario of the tech scene become reality.
The materials also simply fit together too well. Too often, the world we live in almost seems like something out of a science fiction movie, and when you hear the latest news about AI and the like suing people or developing their own languages, it surely gives some people the creeps almost as much as if they were watching a good old horror movie. However, reality is sometimes the best inspiration…
Avengers: Age of Ultron
Yes, a superhero movie from Marvel might not be the first film that pops into your head when you think of the horrors of technology. But Age of Ultron lines up beautifully with our innovators’ worst fears. In the movie, Tony Stark creates an AI with the directive to bring peace to the world. However, Ultron interprets this command differently than the tech billionaire Stark wanted and interprets that the only way to peace is to destroy humanity.
This fear of an artificial intelligence misunderstanding our orders so fundamentally has prevailed for many years and even ended up in some end-times scenarios, such as that of Grey Goo, where small nanobots clean up the Earth a little too well….
eXistenZ
eXistenZ is about a biotech virtual reality game set far in the future. Normal console games as we know them today are a thing of the past and one of the new and innovative VR games is eXistenZ. Here, the protagonists dive deeper and deeper into the virtual world and increasingly lose track of which world is now real and which is virtual.
Even with all the discussions about the metaverse and VR gaming, we can’t get around the phenomenon of so-called escapism. Too quickly we forget what is reality and what is just fiction. We get lost in the artificial immersive content that seems so real and sometimes find it hard to get back. What has already occurred in games like Second Life may also become a big problem in the metaverse in the near future.
2001: A Space Odyssey
How could the classic from 1968 be missing from this list. Here we are several steps ahead in our technological innovation and space travel is not just the dream of some billionaires, but a reality. Astronaut Dr. David Bownman and his colleague Dr. Frank Poole embark on a journey to Jupiter and what sounds like a space adventure at first is a warning against too human artificial intelligence. The supercomputer HAL 9000 is increasingly developing paranoia and trying to ensure its own survival by sabotaging its human crew.
AI that is slowly inferior to humans in terms of a personality is shown by the current debates about artificial intelligence becoming self-aware. Be it smart assistants or developments from Google. We are trying, in order to accelerate the spread of technology, to make AI more and more human, but the classic of film history shows what could happen if we succeed.
Technology and Hollywood. Reality and fiction. Sometimes the filmmakers of our deepest concerns just think ahead and it almost seems like a warning to take a certain route. Whether we listen to it – that remains to be seen.
