What Movies Can Tell Us About AI Visions

Or how my childhood shaped my image of AI today

Despite the current overhype around AI, and wild visions about what AI will be able to do and be in the next years, I believe it will influence our future lives massively. But I'm also sure, it will be different to every scenario we could imagine today.

If you are in my age, you are possibly grow up with movies and series where AI and advanced and futuristic technologies played an important role - maybe you remember Airwolf (1984-1986), Street Hawk (1985), The Six Million Dollar Man (1973-1978).

Maybe you know the following films:

• 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

• Tron (1982)

• Knight Rider (1982-1986) 

• War Games (1983)

For sure these films and TV series were somehow science fiction but tried to create a vison from where we are, not how it could be in 100, 200 or more years.

In 1968 (56 years ago), we came just out of the first AI Winter and HAL-9000 (HAL=Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic) was the human-like AI as part of a space ship in the film, more advanced than AI today, 23 years after 2001.

The 80s, brought us many visions and TV series where AI plays a major role. Tron was a virtual world with the Master Control Programm as an almighty learning super intelligence in a world with many specialized AI agents. If you see modern computer games and the progress of AI today, you would think it is not to far away in many aspects.

The 80s TV series “Knight Rider” gave us a idea about how AI integrated in a car works. The AI K.I.T.T can be seen as a mixture of autonomous driving and modern LLMs with a voice interface. Also here the vision of AI was far beyond what today, 40 years later is possible, even if we see progress in many areas.

War Games was a film not only inspiring young nerds to become hackers and crackers. Also the AI Joshua plays a central role for simulating an steering US military scenarios in the film. It was like a high specialized child having and be able to learn new things. It represents the lack of AI ethics which become more and more important today.

ChatGPT generated the following comparison for these AIs:

So these are the TV experience of my childhood. What have changed since them? I just ended the TV series “Person of Interest”, maybe you know. It is about a AI named “The Machine” with a opponent “Samaritian”. A vision, not unrealistic to what happend after 9/11. These AIs collect data available today from internet, video feeds, telefon talks and so on to predict potential crime and terror attacs in different ways. Key is to understand how humans work to predict their potential future behavior.

So as a conclusion, the whole idea of what AI can be is not new. Sometimes I think it would be a good thing for all the newer AI experts, to look back a little bit, what already had been thought, discussed and shown about the topic. Interestingly ethics and responsibility plays a major role in all the films and TV series mentioned, what is a good thing. We do not have to start again and again, fire up the next hype, even if this can generate a massive step of progress because unbelievable amounts of money are pumped in the system currently. But possibly the next AI winter is coming soon if we find out that all the exaggerated expectations need more time or are partly unrealistic.

Source: Open HPI course

There are no endless extrapolation of growth and progress. But new things will come, getting maybe more important like we have seen with smartphones (iPhone started 2007), business platforms (Airbnb, Uber), the car itself and self-driving cars, cloud computing, … may be all of these us AI today. Isn’t it ironic. But it also shows, that AI is a base technology and not to goal itself.

But we as humans are not really good at learning from history. Let’s see what is coming the next years.

What films have you seen, where AI plays a major role and what is your impression and learning for todays AI activities?

This blog was written in discussion with ChatGPT about what AI presented in these films mean compared to the state of AI at the time the film was produced and today. If you are interested, here is my conversation (in german): https://chatgpt.com/share/9fe2bf20-c289-49ca-be03-fa7c055a1c6b