AI in Cinema: From “2001: A Space Odyssey” to “Mission Impossible” – 60 Years of Technological Anxiety

Since its beginnings, but what can more rigorously be qualified as artificial intelligence (IA) is a theme that dates from the 1960s. While robots and androids are easily used as the metaphor of the proletariat or dehumanized and objective individuals, the disembodied AIs are rather represented as inhuman and deadly entities. This vision can be attached to the advent of the computer and to the way in which the general public gradually apprehended it.

The latter gradually discovers computers at the end of the Second World War, during which machines like Colossus or the Electronic Numerical Integor and Computer (ENIAC) were designed to help decipher German communications or calculate trajectories of ballistic missiles. Research accelerates after 1945 and, very quickly, the press presented the first computers as “giant brains”, as the title of one of the very first books devoted to them in 1949. The following year Time Magazine Pose on the cover a question that is both exciting and disturbing: “Can man build a superman?” »»

Three themes are gradually emerging around the figure of the computer and soon of AI: the automation of the world of work and the resulting unemployment; the technocracy and the advent of a society dedicating disproportionate cult to machines; and the automation of military weapons.

Technological unemployment on the screen

The computer is therefore closely associated with mental faculties, at a time when the term “computer” (“calculator” in French) is still used to designate human beings that carry out mathematical operations. The States Magazine Necklier's Weekly The question of automation suddenly poses in 1953 in these terms: “Will a mechanical brain replace you?” »»

The fear of technological unemployment is already at the center of romantic comedy A head woman (Desk set1957), in which a computer threatens to delete all the positions of secretaries and documentalists from a large company. But the film is sponsored by IBM, then market leader, and actually seeks to convince that there is on the contrary nothing to fear: the inventor (Spencer Tracy) even ends up marrying one of the documentalists (Katharine Hepburn). The credits of the film already literally invite the public to get closer to the intimidating machine and to note that it has nothing harmful.

In 1964, the television series The fourth dimension In turn features a factory boss who installs a computer in order to rationalize the operations of his business. The machine soon dismisses all the workers, the secretaries (no need to cling to maternity holidays, as the leader underlines)-to the boss himself, replaced in a final irony by a robot in the last scene of the episode.

Man in the face of technocratic thinking

The advent of superordinators in the 1960s allows the idea of ​​artificial intelligence – a term invented in 1956 – to popularize in the cinema. Because they are often used to develop AI programs, superordinators are closely associated with the phenomenon. The idea almost instantly makes its way to the screen: if the computer is a giant and ultra-part brain, then perhaps a spirit will arise from this brain?

There follows a certain ambiguity, which continues to the present day: in the term “intelligence”, popular culture intends above all, or ” sentience », That is to say the existence of subjectivity, of capacity not only to reason but also to feel. A full-fledged being-but also, paradoxically, a pure brain, that is to say a cold being, enslaved to logical and ultra-ultra-ultra-ultrague, and which is often used to caricature scientific thinking.

We owe the first major event of this idea to Jean-Luc Godard, who in Alphaville Popularized, as early as 1965, ideas (he was inspired by literary science fiction) that we will very often find in the years to come: a dystopian society led by a conscious supercomputer and endowed with speech, the alpha 60. AI has created an ultra-taught society which is the satire of technocracies, planning and standardization of everyday. This is what Godard himself explains in the false interview of scientists and “thought simulators” published in The New Obs on the occasion of the film's release. For the director, AI is above all the symbol of a society that abandons its freedom to think of machines and technocrats hiding behind.

Soon other movies and television series take over the idea of ​​an individualistic and free hero who fights the ultragal computer and manages, as with Godard, to defeat the machine by submitting a dilemma or an insoluble question that causes his self -destruction. Captain Kirk will – several times – exactly the same in several episodes of Star Trek (1966-1969). The hero of the series the prisoner (1967), captive of a society that denies the individuality of everyone, also manages to push AI to implose by asking him a simple question, insoluble for her: “Why? This type of scene quickly became a cliché, to the point that it was parodied, in 1974, in Dark Starwhere the hero debate of phenomenology and Descartes with … a sentient nuclear bomb.

Nuclear apocalypse

Finally, a third theme was born in 1964: that of an atomic Armageddon caused by a computer or an AI. In Limit point (Fail-safe), from Sidney Lumet, the automation of the country's nuclear defenses through a new computer is responsible for a nuclear disaster. The idea refers to SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment), a national computer system used for the nuclear defense of the United States in the context of the Cold War.

The idea was resumed in 1970 in Colossus (including the French title, Steel brainshows that the same characterization of computers exists in France). The film was shot in the spring of 1968, so before the release of 2001, the space of spacefrom Kubrick, and imagines the eponymous AI take control of the nuclear arsenal of the United States and the Soviet Union. The idea will be taken up several times later, especially in Terminatorin which military AI, Skynet, does the same thing and even causes nuclear apocalypse.

Impossible mission: The Final Reckoning follow the same steps, even recalling Limit point by more than one aspect. The AI, called here “the entity”, uses the Internet to gradually take control of the world's nuclear arsenals. As in the 1964 film, one of the characters is the President of the United States (a president, here), who must decide whether she is to launch a pre-emptive nuclear attack or even, as Henry funded formerly, sacrifice a American city to save the greatest number. The main idea in the film is, as always, to contrast the coldness of the machine to doubts, ethics and empathy of human beings (even that of the military, which rather distances Impossible mission of his predecessors, more critical).

Finally, classically, in Impossible missionAI is assimilated to a possible new deity which would reign over humanity and could exercise its wrath if the latter disobeyed it (we even learn that a sect has just appeared, venerating the entity). The idea is, too, present on the screens in the 1960s, applying to the computer and AI an older criticism relating to the cult of machines. Has not the word computer itself been created, in the 1960s, in reference to the divine order?