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Comment by RajT88 | Hacker News Reader

I've been joking at work that the 70's was filled with cautionary tales about AI that we should be listening to.

(Except for Demon Seed. That one jumped the shark - but I did love their rendition of what an AI data center looks like)

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The "Demon Seed" book was creepier (and a lot more pervy) than the movie.

Dean Koontz? I've read a couple of his books, and I'm not surprised at the suggestion he had bad or awkward sex scenes, but weird rapey AI level awkward? Yikes.

He started off as a porn writer. Awful, atrocious sludge. Wrote most of those under pen names, so it's not provable what is and isn't his, but it's 80% certain on quite a few of them. But that wasn't even uncommon for science fiction writers and scifi-adjacent writers like him.

Demon Seed is schlocky, but it’s perhaps worth watching once. That said, I will readily admit that the film is bad for many reasons. Though horror films aren’t generally known for being inoffensive, the ending is disturbing in content and gratuitous in presentation. Perhaps the film works best as a warning and as a critique, though I’m really scrounging and scraping here. I blame Dean Koontz for the premise of the original novel, though I have no idea why anyone thought that the book needed to be adapted to film, but here I am talking about it.

I’m glad you brought up Demon Seed all the same, as I was reminded of it while reading TFA.

When the computer system from the film commands a character to “open that door, and clean these lenses” in a particular scene, the absurdity and mundanity of being commanded to clean a camera by an AI is subtly horrifying.

For a modern analogue, I’m reminded of DoorDash workers being dispatched to close doors left ajar by passengers of autonomous Waymos.

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