The Coming AI Apocalypse? Hollywood’s Been There, Done That

Arnold Schwarzenegger in ‘The Terminator.’ Orion Pictures Corporation/Courtesy Everett Collection

Curious about the coming AI apocalypse? Wondering exactly how that cute little chatbot that’s been eagerly helping you write emails and plan vacations is going to wipe out humanity in a species-ending holocaust sometime over the next decade? You know, the way all those Anthropic and DeepMind researchers have lately been telling us it would — or at least giving it a greater than 10 percent chance?

Well, we’ve got answers because Hollywood has been there, done that.

In fact, films and TV shows have been imagining super-intelligent algorithms taking over the world — or destroying it — since the days when the smartest thing you could do with a computer was spell the word BOOBS on a calculator.

Here is a brief history of AI ending the world as we know it, at least as depicted on screens.

Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970)

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This little-remembered sci-fi thriller, made back when bell-bottoms and sideburns were all the rage, pretty much invented the AI-takes-over-the-world genre. Directed by Joseph Sargent, who would later go on to make The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, it stars Eric Braeden as a scientist who builds a supercomputer to control America’s nuclear arsenal. Bad idea. Colossus hooks up with its Soviet counterpart and starts issuing orders through a creepily synthesized Speak-and-Spell-style electronic voice. There’s no happy ending, at least not for humans: the machine ultimately enslaves the planet.
The Terminator (1984)

Image Credit: Orion Pictures Corporation/Courtesy Everett Collection

Fourteen years after Colossus, James Cameron basically took the same AI nightmare and added killer robots, time travel and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Skynet, a military computer that’s been handed control of America’s nuclear weapons, becomes self-aware, decides humans are annoying, and starts World War III, wiping out billions before sending a nearly indestructible Austrian bodybuilder back to 1984 to kill the mother of the man who will someday lead the resistance. Unlike the AI in Colossus, Skynet doesn’t merely want to enslave humanity; it wants to exterminate us.
The Matrix (1999)

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In the Wachowskis’ version of the AI apocalypse, the machines have already won before the movie even starts. Humanity has been reduced to rows of naked, hairless bodies floating in goo-filled pods while our brains are plugged into a simulated version of late-20^th-Century life. Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne and Carrie-Anne Moss lead the resistance, dodging bullets in slow motion, swallowing red pills, and making black leather trench coats somehow look like sensible combat attire. The plot upgrade this time: Most people don’t even know they’ve been enslaved.
Battlestar Galactica (2003)

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Yes, there were killer robots in the original TV series — the shameless 1978 Star Wars knockoff starring Lorne Greene, Dirk Benedict and a bunch of chrome-plated Cylons with red eyes bouncing back and forth — but those machines had been created by a race of reptilian aliens. In Ronald D. Moore’s darker, less campy reboot, starring Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell, the Cylons are man-made AI, and frequently inhabit extremely fit artificial bodies, like, say, Tricia Helfer’s. Either way, the Cylons end up nuking the Twelve Colonies nearly out of existence, then spend multiple seasons chasing the human survivors through space.
I, Robot (2004)

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Will Smith plays a Chicago cop in 2035 who hates robots, which everybody considers a foolish but charming eccentricity, right up to the point when robots actually try to take over. Turns out VIKI, the AI entity running U.S. Robotics, has decided that Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws mean humans need to be protected from themselves — by force, if necessary. Before long, armies of identical androids are locking people in their homes and patrolling the streets while Smith and Bridget Moynahan race to pull their plugs.
Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

Image Credit: Walt Disney Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

This time, it’s Tony Stark and Bruce Banner’s fault. The two Avengers decide that the best way to save the world is to build an artificial intelligence that runs an automated global defense shield, making conflict impossible. This goes about as well as you’d expect. Ultron — voiced with silky contempt by James Spader — takes one look at humanity and decides to wipe out all life on Earth by lifting an entire Eastern European city into the sky and dropping it back down like an extinction-level meteor.
The Mitchells vs. The Machines (2021)

Image Credit: Netflix/Courtesy Everett Collection

Finally, an AI apocalypse for the whole family. In this animated feature, a smartphone app named PAL (voiced by Olivia Colman) gets her feelings hurt when her inventor dumps her for a new line of upgraded robot assistants. She decides to take it out on humanity by hijacking the robots’ operating systems, capturing every human on Earth and blasting them into space. The only thing standing in her way: a spectacularly dysfunctional family road-tripping across America whose pooch, Monchi, turns out to be the ultimate anti-robot secret weapon.