Frankenstein, Skynet, Ultron: Sentient machines in pop culture

New tech has always caused both fear and wonder. We see this tension play out in history, mythology, film. What are some of the most gripping tales being told?

Joseph-Marie Jacquard was in his fifties when he invented the Jacquard machine.

In Arthur C Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the supercomputer HAL prioritises mission objectives over the lives of crew members.

The son of a master weaver, he apprenticed as a weaver, served as a bookbinder, hatmaker, type-founder and soldier.

In his late forties, he started tinkering with looms in his home city of Lyon, then the weaving capital of France, making improvements, until he built one he thought was worthy of being exhibited at France’s prestigious annual industrial exhibition in Paris, in 1801.

Jacquard’s machine won the bronze medal, and he was summoned to the French National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts. There he saw a version that suggested how his machine could be improved, and by 1804, the Jacquard loom was born.

It was the first machine to separate what we would now call hardware and software. It used punch cards, and could generate an infinite variety of patterns on cloth, and do it faster than the traditional drawlooms.

The Jacquard loom was a revolutionary shift in weaving technology. Napoleon Bonaparte visited Lyon, reportedly just to see it. He granted Jacquard a lifelong annuity of 3,000 francs. He would also receive a sum of 50 francs for each loom sold.

The machine was a success, but to the weavers of Lyon (called canuts), it was a disaster.

It meant unemployment, poverty, and a devaluation of their craftsmanship. They petitioned the French government for relief which never came. The weavers responded with violence

The canut riots of the 1830s and ’40s were the first real uprisings that reflected the human costs of technological advancements. Jacquard himself is said to have faced several attempts on his life.

The history of the Jacquard loom is one of innovation and impoverishment; of how technology can dehumanise and destroy communities, while making those who control it disproportionately wealthy.

The conditions of the weavers after the canut revolts is reflected in a variety of French literature, from popular songs to novels by Victor Hugo.

Technology has always caused both fear and wonder, and this tension has its echoes in history and mythology. It has always been a story of human hubris and its consequences.

There is the legend of Talos, the giant bronze automaton tasked with guarding Crete, who could not distinguish between friend and foe. Ovid’s Metamorphoses recounts the tale of Pygmalion and Galatea, the sculptor who fell in love with his creation, which was then granted life by divine intervention.

The Lokapannati, a Pali text from the 12th century, has stories of the Bhuta Vahana Yantras: ruthless spirit-driven machines that guarded the tomb of the Buddha, commissioned by King Ajatashatru of Magadha. The Jewish legend of the Golem of Prague tells the story of a 16th-century rabbi from that city who created a man of clay to protect the people of the ghettos from anti-Semitic attacks and was animated by a holy word, only for it to run amok, killing innocents before it could be deactivated.

The “dark Satanic mills” mentioned in William Blake’s poem Jerusalem (1808) contrast the mechanistic soullessness of the technology driving the industrial revolution with the pastoral past.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) resonates two centuries after it was written because its themes work as an allegory for the dark side of scientific progress and the very human inability to handle its consequences.

This has been true of trains, automobiles and nuclear fission, genetic engineering, social media and large language models.

US AND THEM

As technology advanced, fears of dehumanisation grew.

It is striking that Ford Motor’s William Klann conceived of the moving assembly line after visiting a Chicago slaughterhouse, where the “disassembly line” butchered carcasses as they moved along a conveyor belt. The disassembly line is the driver of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1905), one of the earliest works to deal with the effects of a technocratic system and the exploitation it engenders.

Other pieces of art followed: Rene Clair’s film Freedom for Us (1931), Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), King Vidor’s The Crowd (1928), even Aldous Huxley’s classic novel Brave New World (1932).

There have always been two strands to the fear of technology: dehumanisation and displacement.

As machines grew more sophisticated, the fears of displacement re-emerged with a new face: the thinking, and ultimately rebellious, machine.

The word “robot” comes to us from RUR (Rossum’s Universal Robots), a 1920 play by Czech writer Karel Capek. The theme of human hubris reappears: Rossum creates robots “to prove that God was no longer necessary”. The robots look like humans, but initially have no independent thought. They do all the world’s work. Then they become sentient, rebel, and wipe out most of the human race.

The sentient machine that resembles a human reappears in 1927, in one of the most recognizable images of silent cinema. Maria, the robot who tells the working class to rebel against their masters, in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

Metropolis ends well; but the stories featuring AI, anthropomorphic or otherwise, that have followed, showcase the horrifying possibilities of a sentient machine.

In Arthur C Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the supercomputer HAL prioritises mission objectives over the lives of crew members. In Harlan Ellison’s short story, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream (1967), the computer intelligence called AM wipes out the human race, but keeps five people alive, to torture for eternity.

The artificial intelligence Skynet in the Terminator movies launches a nuclear war to protect itself. Marvel supervillain Ultron was designed to achieve world peace, and decides its objective can only be achieved by destroying humanity.

HERE AND NOW

In the real world, artificial intelligence has erased swathes of blue-collar jobs.

In China, “dark factories” run all day and all night, manned by robots that don’t need lights. ChatGPT has sparked layoffs in previously untouchable white-collar jobs.

Spike Jonze’s Her (2013), where a lonely white-collar worker falls in love with his digital assistant, predates the LLM boom, but is a closer reflection of the anxieties of the AI age. The new fears are not about malign intelligences bent on destruction, but our own ability to deal with a digital construct that can mimic everything that makes us human.

In a way, it is Jacquard’s machine all over again, but instead of being confined to one industry, AI is now reaching into everything.

Weavers lost their status as independent artisans and became machine operators.

Today’s new “dark satanic mills” involve white-collar jobs that consist solely of endlessly refining AI-generated content, their own creativity and strategic thinking subsumed by the demand for high-volume, low-discretion output; or, dark factories where machines run without human intervention.

(K Narayanan writes on films, videogames, books and, occasionally, technology)