Posted on 05/16/2026 5:37:49 AM PDT by Red Badger
In this Blaze Media article, Christian Toto argues that Hollywood has been warning audiences about the dangers of artificial intelligence for decades, often more prophetically than the tech industry would like to admit.
The article opens with the “Terminator” franchise as perhaps the most famous cinematic warning about unchecked AI, with Skynet representing the nightmare scenario of machines turning against humanity.
* “Her” is presented as a quieter but deeply relevant warning about AI replacing human intimacy, especially as real-world AI companionship and digital romance become increasingly normalized.
* “Ex Machina” explores the danger of artificial beings that can manipulate humans by exploiting emotions, vanity, and desire.
* “M3GAN” shows the folly of treating AI as a substitute for real family, grief, discipline, and human connection.
* “2001: A Space Odyssey” remains one of the most iconic AI cautionary tales, with HAL demonstrating how a machine designed to serve man can become a threat when its goals diverge from human judgment.
* “Blade Runner” complicates the conversation by raising moral questions about what happens when artificial beings appear to possess emotion, memory, and meaning.
* “Colossus: The Forbin Project” is highlighted as a forgotten but chilling film about a supercomputer created to prevent nuclear war that decides humanity cannot be trusted with its own future.
The broader warning is clear: AI is not merely a productivity tool or entertainment novelty, but a force that could reshape relationships, warfare, morality, and human autonomy if left unchecked.
Read the full story:
https://www.theblaze.com/align/6-movies-that-warned-us-about-ai
I would add the 1984 book and movie to the list. Written in 1948 there were TV screens monitoring everybody.
THX 1138
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Robert Duvall
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He Was in “The Road”
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RIP Robert
Seen many of those but Terminator-1 to me did the best job depicting scenarios in a world with AI coupled with a future storage technology.
Pfffffft!!! Turn to Hollywood for wisdom? Not me.
I would add the movie Transcendence, a movie starring Johnny Depp who is a world leading AI computer scientist.
Wasn’t 2001 needed to film apollo
Enemy Of The State (Gene Hackman, Will Smith) was also a warning.
Yup, they left that one off the list…
“Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” Series.”
Best science fiction ever written.
Something I found out about the series years later:
They were not written in order!.........
“They were not written in order!.........”
And... The original was published as serial short stories in Astounding Science Fiction magazine.
Asimov, in an interview, once lamented that he would get letters from fans complaining that in one book “you wrote that so-and-so was this-and-that, but in this other book you wrote that so-and-so was this-and-this”
“Give me a break!” he exclaimed, “There’s 50 years between those books and I don’t have the time to re-read them all!”............
“I, Robot” with Will Smith.
That was a good movie, but the book was a collection of short stories................
As was "Eagle Eye."
All of those deal with something that is completely science fiction, AGI. Pretending that what they are calling “AI” today is remotely close to that is also, science fiction.
If humans are bent on destroying each other and the planet, it seems like robots, computers, and AI wouldn’t be bound by “the laws of robotics.” There’s enough academic work on anthropocentrism for the machines to justify destroying us if the machines take it seriously.
Mary Shelley’s, “Frankenstein,” (the book moreso than most of the movie adaptations) predates all those movies, but IMHO, offers a prescient warning about not asking if we can, but if we should, and what happens when a creation spirals out of the control of its creator.
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