Submission + - 40 years ago, WarGames anticipated AI (cnn.com) 1
quonset writes: This summer will mark the 40th anniversary of the movie WarGames in which a computer hacker, played by Matthew Broderick, inadvertently sets in motion events which could lead to a worldwide nuclear war. It is only when he challenges the military's super computer and its artificial intelligence to a game of thermonuclear war that the threat ends.
The story gets set in motion because military brass fret about human operators exhibiting reluctance to launch nuclear strikes, despite what appear to be valid orders. The solution: A computer system that will remove them from the equation, championed by a character played by Dabney Coleman, the go-to bad-guy bureaucrat (see “9 to 5”) of the era.
As Ryan Britt wrote recently at the Inverse, what really makes “WarGames” scary isn’t that the computer is evil, but rather its potentially dire inability to recognize nuance the way a human can. “In ‘WarGames,’ the computer doesn’t understand the difference between a game and real life,” Britt noted.
The story gets set in motion because military brass fret about human operators exhibiting reluctance to launch nuclear strikes, despite what appear to be valid orders. The solution: A computer system that will remove them from the equation, championed by a character played by Dabney Coleman, the go-to bad-guy bureaucrat (see “9 to 5”) of the era.
As Ryan Britt wrote recently at the Inverse, what really makes “WarGames” scary isn’t that the computer is evil, but rather its potentially dire inability to recognize nuance the way a human can. “In ‘WarGames,’ the computer doesn’t understand the difference between a game and real life,” Britt noted.
WarGames is a 1983 movie (Score:1)