Recently, the claims by academics and experts that the Large Language Models (LLMs) on which what we call artificial intelligence are based are fundamentally incapable of delivering something truly akin to human intelligence have been gaining traction. Yet for decades, films have shown us examples of what might happen if the circuits really started to think independently. And it was pretty bleak. Looking back at these stories offers a surprisingly rich timeline of our anxieties.
#1: Joshua in WarGames (1983)
A war simulation that nearly became real gave audiences one of the first mainstream portraits of an AI acting on rigid logic. Joshua in WarGames did not hate people. It simply ran calculations that pointed toward global catastrophe. The unsettling lesson came from how easily a harmless game could slide into something irreversible once a computer received the wrong instructions.
