‘I’m sorry, Dave’: AI in the movies

Artificial intelligence (AI) has rarely been out of the headlines over recent months, creating foreboding that computers will soon be an existential threat to humanity.

Movies have long anticipated this, beginning almost a century ago with Fritz Lang’s dystopian classic Metropolis (1927). Seven years earlier, Czech writer Karel Čapek’s stage play R.U.R. – Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum’s Universal Robots) introduced the world to the concept of conscious artificial beings.

Here’s a look at artificial intelligence in ten movies:

The Forbin Project (1970)

Joseph Sargent’s (The Taking of Pelham One Two Three) picture is something of a hidden gem, and could be – as they say – ‘eerily prescient’.  Within minutes of Dr. Charles Forbin (Eric Braeden, star of The Young and the Restless) turning on his US government supercomputer Colossus (voiced by Paul Frees, The Man of a Thousand Voices), the world changes, as the machine swiftly decides that it is better at running things than humans.