The AI Says It’s an Enemy: Relinquishing Control to the Machine in Yukikaze
There is no shortage of television shows and films which place at center the question of human importance in the era of artificial intelligence. In film alone, the roots of this central question go back at least to Franz Lang’s expressionist film Metropolis (1927), with Maria’s robotic double wreaking havoc upon the titular city, a theme found in literature stretching back beyond even Frankenstein (1818). Film and television have, as such, been long interested in artificial intelligence, whether in computer form, as in Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) or 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), or robot form, as in The Invisible Boy (1957) or The Day the Earth Stood Still (1957). One common feature in Western (especially U.S.) cinema is the threat of such technologies to human life, whether for sadistic or noble purposes. Our machines develop a mind of their own and turn on us, either because we plan to oppress them or because machine interests and human interests do not align (see The Matrix (1999)). When machines aren’t determined to kill us, they may require us to relinquish control, as in our contemporary fear of automation, which means restructuring society to find new things for humans to do while machines (artificially intelligent but not sentient) can continue to produce for us. U.S.-American science fiction, in a sense, has always been wary of our technology even as we allow it to bleed into our everyday lives and even when that “bleed” results in some truly creepy moments.