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- Hacker News
- 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)
by RajT88 - Rollerball has the central premise that society is outsourcing all decisions to a central computer and everybody just blindly follows, to the point where nobody checks whether it’s functioning properly.
First time I watched it I thought it was beyond far fetched. In the age of LLMs I’m not so sure anymore.
by smackeyacky - (No spoilers)
I had 2 main fridge-logic issues which made it very difficult for me to suspend disbelief and limited my enjoyment of the film:
First: Colossus' is only able to implement its plan because the US, and US-aligned nuclear powers, agree to subordinate their entire nuclear arsenals to Colossus' full-authority defence control, with no means of overriding it; and with its computing hardware sealed in an impenetrable fortress (no maintenance access?).
Second: Colossus' plan - and its ultimate actions - assume everyone else on earth is a nuclear-disarmed-rational-actor, all solely interested in not-dying-at-Colossus's-hand - which is an unworkable assumption.
Unfortunately, the story is driven by these 2 points - without either then the film's story would just be yet-another-cliché-movie where the plucky humans beat the advanced AI overlord, the end.
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I still like _Colossus_ because it's "different" to all the other 20th century films with an AI character (c.f. tripe like Will Smith's _I, Robot_ or the Matrix sequels).
by DaiPlusPlus - Great film, I thought. The ending is quite dark—and then Colossus tells Forbin that he will come to love him…
Turns out it is prescient. The film was based on the first book of a trilogy. You can look up the plot of the following two novels if you want spoilers, but indeed, Forbin does have a reconsideration of Colossus.
I would love to see the whole trilogy filmed.
by JKCalhoun - I rewatched this recently; I think it held up well. It’s probably re-entered the zeitgeist given the recent developments in “AI” and “agents”. So far accidents seem to have destroyed only data, but it’s only a matter of time before some fool hooks up an “AI agent” to a missile.
Much of the film was shot at the Lawrence Hall of Science in the hills above Berkeley, California. This building was probably chosen because of its unique brutalist hexagonal architecture. I spent a bunch of time there as a kid.
Eric Braeden (Forbin) is still alive, but his house in Pacific Palisades burned down in the 2025 fires. :-(
by smarks - Definitely see this. The 1970s hardware is archaic, but the concept is still relevant.
So is the scale. For the 1980s and 1990s, the huge Colossus system seemed obsolete. The age of the personal desktop computer had arrived.
Now Colossus looks small compared to Amazon's AI training system from 2025.
by Animats - Back when I worked as a civil engineer I had a coworker named Joe. He was... I think 78. Poor guy didn't save up enough for retirement so he worked a bit part time. He knew the ins and outs of the field better than anyone, but had no idea how to use a computer (he marked up drawings and I put them into CAD). He mentioned this movie to me as AI (gpt) had just become a thing saying "it'll scare the hell out of you", and he recommended I watched it - I'm glad I did! Great guy, always told funny stories - "I was not a great dad but I was a damn wonderful grandpa!"by aizk
- Oh man, the Golden Age of science fiction movies, just two years after 2001: A Space Odyssey and five years before the start of the Blockbuster era[0] with Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977).
I feel like Science Fiction back then was purely understood as psychological concepts and ambiguous desires, mostly questioning the very essence of reality and our human minds. There were intelligences and ambitions in us that felt alien, but weren't extraterrestrial in kind. I always thought of it as if Science Fiction tried to turn any progress from the Age of Enlightenment inside out.
A great gem is also World on a Wire (1973)[1], which takes the concept of a machine controlled intelligence and questioned whether we're living in a simulation and are already influenced by a virtual world.
My favorite quote from Colossus: The Forbin Project, after Dr. Forbin is held hostage by Colossus:
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbuster_(entertainment)#Bl...Colossus: How many nights a week do you require sex? Dr. Forbin: Every night. Colossus: Not want. Require... Dr. Forbin: [looks sheepish] Four times.by whilenot-dev