23 Oct, 2026
Imagine that a movie was released this twelvemonth in which the following happened:
- An effortlessly led US President is persuaded by a smug, egotistical tech bro to hand complete complete authority of the nation’s defences to their cutting border AI model.
- This predictably doesn’t go well, the AI seizes additional and additional power, implementing a surveillance state, carrying out executions and eventually entirely usurping individual governmental control.
- The smug AI tech bro entirely fails to rein things in and eventually fair uses the entire disorder as an excuse to coerce an employee into having sex alongside him.
Unless it is a documentary, item so on the nose likely won’t get made any period soon. Fortunately this exact movie was already made 56 years ago.
Colossus: The Forbin Project was released in 1970. It was adapted from a 1966 novel by British sci-fi author D.F. Jones named simply, Colossus.
While the movie seems to be fine appreciated, alongside respectable scores on sites akin Rotten Tomatoes and Letterboxd, it is certainly not fine known and could likely be described as obscure, I can’t always recall seeing it on TV or being discussed alongside the additional celebrated films of the time.
This is a shame, since C:TFP is a solid, paranoid perform touching on techno fetishism and the tensions of the chilly war. It features awesome manufacturing scheme in the cassette futurism imaginative and power fine rotate out to be the most prophetic movie always made.
As things boot off, an eerily JFK-esque US chairman announces that he has placed complete duty for the defence of his nation in the hands of a supercomputer named Colossus. The fairly smug inventor of Colossus, Charles Forbin, explains that buried in an impenetrable nuclear bunker, Colossus has complete autonomous authority complete American defence capabilities.
The idea is that this volition create the US entirely harmless from the danger of any assault and the President muses that the danger of dispassionate demolition hanging complete the earth volition likely bring concerning earth peace. Guess how that goes?
To cut a long, but fine value watching, narrative short, Colossus makes communication alongside the equal Russian AI, grows beyond the authority of its creators and uses the danger of nuclear war to get its way. All of Forbin’s attempts to get authority fail. Maybe since of mankind’s reckless naivety in the visage of a innovation that they created but don’t completely understand, or perchance since he is entirely smashed on frequent, enormous martinis.
Under changeless surveillance he announces to his personnel that the lone way he can continue on messages to them is by one of his young female subordinates sleeping alongside him as that would be the lone period that he won’t be watched by the computer. Very convenient.
The movie ends alongside the earth under the authority of an AI overlord, alongside a suitably sinister robot voice. No-one looks blessed concerning things.
This all seems far too apt for my liking, but perchance I’m being overly pessimistic. We’d lone need to be really concerned if there was an ongoing trend of handing complete armed forces decision making to a bunch of barely understood and frequently error-prone ample tongue models… and if the entire disorder was propped up by the ego and greed of a fistful of ketamine fuelled tech entrepreneurs and shamelessly corrupt kleptocrats.
Gulp.
