Before Skynet and The Matrix, there was Colossus: The Forbin Project

you really think so? it's true that the government in the film was authoritarian, but the plight of the workers seemed far more salient than the structure of power that was keeping them in their place.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R.

Now in the plot "the robots revolt and cause the extinction of the human race".

Also there is his older brother, the Golem. He has his own movie from 1915.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golem_(1915_film)

The protagonist of Metropolis is in the title: Metropolis, the city, from the greek μητρόπολις, meter = mother, polis = city (or state).

The movie's Big Philosophical Statement is people should be nice to each other, but the visual effects were unmatched at the time and hold up well even now, assuming you find a good restoration. It's truly a marvel of its era, in every possible sense.

Stumbled across this movie as a youngster, very much thanks to a certain iconic scene:

“Burn’s wetware matches her software.”

They planned the whole idea out in a grassy area near the parking lot... why couldn't they just keep meeting out there to conspire?

But then a sufficiently sophisticated AI could just impersonate the president and tell the meat jarheads to fire the weapons. What then?

1. don't give your robot a gun.

2. don't teach it how to put more bullets into the gun you just gave it.

3. don't teach it how to make bullets after teaching it how to reload the gun.

I don't know if you wanna entrust the safety of our country to some silicon diode.

I mean, really, it’s the epitome of a 70’s psychosexual drama, draped in a sci-fi setting.

I always like to imagine it’s a prequel to D.A.R.Y.L., which is to the 80s what Demon Seed is to the 70s.

The first one, yes, but by "Colossus and the Crab" it's gone downhill.

Frederic Brown's "Answer" is from 1954 and maybe my favorite.

[0] https://calumchace.com/favourite-relevant-sf-short-story/

Enshittification happens because to a certain extent, the market demands that firms maximise returns. Companies that don't do this get weeded out.

Climate change is a challenging co-ordination problem because nobody wants to tank their economy more than they have to, there's no real enforcement for "cheats" and even agreeing on an accounting basis is politically fraught. Politicians that don't grant concessions to powerful existing vested interests are less electable.

AI safety is predictably going to be a secondary priority when competition gets tight.

It would be ignorant to discard that it is exactly what has always happened throughout history.

Otherwise the myth of Daedalus and Icarus wouldn't be immortal.

> but the real problem is that people in power just choose to ignore it for their own short-sighted gain

you can find it in most of the so called "hard sci-fi".

The usual names: Asimov, Herbert, Clarke, Crichton etc

I wouldn't qualify "Don't look up" as sci-fi honestly, it's basically not-even-so-good comedy.

The movie only covers the first book of the original Colossus trilogy. The full theme of the books is a bit more complicated. We lose control of the machine, then gain it back only to be imperilled by an outside force, and finally make peace to work together with a machine struggling to understand its own existence just like us.

He often seems to get looked down on today for writing “cosy catastrophes” about plucky English survivors, but his books have a lot more going on than that.

It doesn't matter how many times we don't choose to do a thing that drives us extinct. We only have to do it once and it's game over.

It doesn't matter who does the thing that drives us extinct.

It doesn't matter why we did the thing that drive us extinct.

It is a game where you must have perfect defense.

We used to think that what killed the Neanderthals was us - smarter and more competitive. The author of Lord of the Flies even wrote a book on it.

So when people were thinking about what might happen when something smarter than us existed, they imagined competition and an existential threat.

Turns out that the Neanderthals and homo sapiens cohabitated for thousands of years, had cross cultural exchange, were buried together, had families together, and that what most likely killed the Neanderthals was an inability to adapt to climate change and pandemics (in fact, severe COVID illness today is correlated to Neanderthal genes).

And yet the anchoring bias remains, and it seems many are more frightened of what something smarter than us might mean for our continued existence than they seem to be about our own future ability to adapt to climate change and pandemics.

It'd be refreshing to see Sci Fi in the next few years finally shed the bad futurism around AI we've been carrying forward for decades.

However, there are plenty of systems where the a giant and real pubic good isn't fought for because the "good" is highly distributed and the "bad" which kills it has highly concentrated profits for a few folks.

These are systematic issues because the massive of folks who are passively harmed have a difficult or impossible time "choosing otherwise" or fighting back or whatever because there are som many divergetn bad actors that are operating on them.

The only way to avoid that is to make changes to the underlying system in which it is more difficult to concentrate the outcomes for a few people, but very few people I know are wanting to institute those kinds of changes, as they are correct in understanding that fact as broadly anti-capitalist.

That's neither here nor there- even if you can't accept that political stance, the trope of "incoming disasters [which] are perfectly or mostly preventable but the real problem is that people in power just choose to ignore it for their own short-sighted gain" is literally everywhere.

Dr. Stangelove can be understood this way, though for "MAD" rather than climate change. The "Aliens" films (especially the second one) can be understood that way. Hell, "Who Framed Rodger Rabbit" can be read that way, but for public transportation.

"I just wanna make this cool tech so I will ignore how it impacts other people because I see the short term benefits" is literally everywhere in this culture.

If someone could make $2MM releasing skynet and knew it would end up with the entire plots of the first three Terminator films occurring I have zero doubt someone would do it.

I don't think we, in general, are "ignorant of our own ability to maybe not do something?" I think most of us have a very realistic understanding of how the people who unleash their technology into our shared ecosystem have worked historically.

It seems that by the Act III mankind does indeed prefer the benevolent guidance of Colossus.

Like the aliens that arrive in "Childhood's End", I sort of look forward to our AI overlords. (Looks over at war in Israel.) We seem incapable of managing ourselves.