Samuel Butler's 1863 article Darwin Among the Machines, is generally thought to be the origin of this species of writing, and it mostly just notes that while humankind invented machines to assist us - and remember, a really sophisticated machine in 1863 was the steam locomotive - we were increasingly assisting them: tending, fueling, repairing. Darwin Among the MachinesĮarlier literary notions of "artificial" intelligence - and there were not a lot of them at that point - hadn't really caught the public's imagination. So his intelligent machine simply observed (with an unblinking red eye) and, when addressed directly, spoke with a calm, modulated voice, not unlike the one that would be adopted four decades later by Siri and Alexa. In 1968, for instance, the year before humans first set foot on the moon - and a time when astronauts still used pencils and slide rules to calculate re-entry trajectories because their space capsules had less computing power than a digital watch has today - Stanley Kubrick introduced movie audiences to a sentient HAL-9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey.Īnd anyway, malevolent robot stories were precisely the sort of B-movie silliness Kubrick was trying to avoid. Misuse of AI is part of what actors and writers are striking about in Hollywood, and the threat of AI is something Hollywood was imagining long before it was real. With a voice that sounded like that of HAL. android blinked and his extremities twitched for only a moment. Artificial intelligence that can mimic conversation, whether written or spoken, has been in the news a lot this year, delighting some members of the public while worrying educators, politicians, the World Health Organization, and even some of the people developing AI technology. eyes quickly opened and closed behind the thick. That's worth mentioning because it's no longer something you can just assume. Malevolent robot stories used to be more about brawn than brain - so it was a genuine shock for audiences in 1968 when the sentient HAL-9000 computer calmly said, "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that." Above, Gary Lockwood and Keir Dullea in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
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