Woozy Song wrote:
It just occurred to me that it was not the first AI
computer. Alpha 60 was the evil sentient computer in
the French movie Alphaville, that came out a year earlier.
So writer Ian Black got the idea from that?
It's hard to know where a writer gets their ideas from unless
they acknowledge their influences. If they nicked them from
elsewhere they're not always going to be in a rush to say so!
There was a play in the 1920's by Karl Capek, R.U.R. ("Rossum's
Universal Robots"), that as well as introducing the term 'robot'
into sci-fi lore, could also be the originator of those "evil
computer" ideas.
Whilst the robots in R.U.R. are not exactly AI the way we talk
about it today, they are autonomous artificial beings. The
robots in R.U.R. eventually rebel against their human creators,
leading to the extinction of the human race. So R.U.R.
introduced the idea of sentient, autonomous machines that can
turn against humanity... a theme that has since become a
cornerstone of science fiction stories, and more relevantly
today... the possible future awaiting us all because of AI! It's
possible the creator's of Alpha 60 and WOTAN were aware of
Capek's R.U.R. and layered their own ideas over its basic
premise to come up with their evil computers?
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