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Notes -
I was struck, thinking about it for this, by just how diverse the genre is?
You have the classic 'killer robot' trope, where the machines are just plain evil and intentionally want to destroy humanity - thus Skynet or AM.
You have the machine that is faithfully executing the commands given to it in good faith and threatens to destroy everything out of ignorance - thus WOPR.
You have the machine that is attempting to fulfil its designed purpose in good faith but which suffers some kind of fatal error and goes crazy - thus HAL 9000.
You have the machines that genuinely want the best for humanity and try to achieve that even contrary to our explicitly stated preferences - think 'With Folded Hands' (1947), or Asimov played around with this. 'The Evitable Conflict' (1950) was about machines taking charge of the future with humanity's welfare in mind, and seems ambivalent about whether that's desirable.
It seems like these categories cover most plausible AI fears. The AI could be actively hostile to humans, the AI could be indifferent to or ignorant of human life, the AI could be schizophrenic or malfunctioning, and the AI could be benevolent in ways that we do not desire.
Obviously none of these stories map perfectly to contemporary worries, but there's enough, I think, that the concept of AI or robots or machines going wrong in a dangerous way was firmly stuck in the public consciousness long before an autodidact started a blog in 2009.
Absolutely. For fun I'd even add the AI in Alien (1979), which is programmed perfectly to serve its masters but by that very token is indifferent to its fellow humans and even its own survival in a way a rational human would not be.
Oh, and to that I should add works like Blade Runner or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, or even Frank Herbert's original concept for the Butlerian Jihad, where even perfectly well-behaved thinking machines might challenge what it means to be human metaphysically. Even that has been considered potentially existentially threatening. It's not literal destruction, but what if machines change our very concept of what it means to be alive, or to have a soul?
Less Wrong asked some of these questions in the 2010s, but then, so did Mass Effect. It's a genre staple.
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