automation
21 films tagged with “automation”
Blade Runner 2049
The question the first film asked was whether a manufactured being could be conscious. The question this film asks is whether a manufactured being can reproduce, and the difference between those two questions is the diff…
Her
Her is the most accurate film about consumer artificial intelligence ever made, and it achieves this without a single scene about capability. Nobody in it asks whether Samantha is conscious, tests her, or worries about a…
Moon
Moon is an employment story. It is set on the far side of the Moon, it involves cloning and corporate conspiracy and a robot named GERTY who communicates partly through emoticons, but the structure underneath all of that…
WALL-E
The first thirty minutes of WALL-E contain almost no dialogue and constitute one of the most precise depictions of work ever put on film. A small robot wakes up, charges his solar panels, puts on his treads, and goes to…
Minority Report
The system works. This is established early, stated often, and never contradicted by the evidence within the film's own logic. The precogs see murders before they happen, and Pre-Crime intervenes, and for six years no on…
The Iron Giant
The Iron Giant does not know what it is. This is the film's first and most important structural choice: the robot arrives damaged, its memory erased, its purpose unavailable to itself. It does not know where it came from…
Ghost in the Shell
The question the film poses is not whether an artificial mind can be conscious. It is whether a human mind, having replaced enough of itself, still is. Major Kusanagi's body is entirely prosthetic — manufactured, maintai…
Sneakers
The MacGuffin in Sneakers is a small black box that decrypts everything. Plug it into the Federal Reserve and the accounts open. Plug it into air traffic control and the system is legible. Plug it into the power grid, mi…
RoboCop
The boardroom scene tells you everything the film is about, and it happens before the title character exists. Omni Consumer Products is demonstrating ED-209, a fully autonomous enforcement unit, to its senior leadership.…
WarGames
The break-in that starts the catastrophe is not a break-in. David is looking for an unreleased video game, finds an undocumented dial-up number, and is greeted by a prompt: shall we play a game? — followed by a menu that…
Logan's Run
The city works. That is the first thing the film establishes and the thing it never lets you forget. Nobody in the domed city of 2274 is hungry, cold, lonely, or bored. Pleasure is universally available and friction has…
Dark Star
The crew of the Dark Star has been in space for twenty years, and it is important to understand what that means in organisational terms. Nobody has been fired, nobody has been promoted, nobody has received new instructio…
THX 1138
George Lucas made this film in 1971, before Star Wars, before Industrial Light & Magic, before merchandising became his real product — and the fact that the same person made THX 1138 and then built one of the most vertic…
Colossus: The Forbin Project
Nothing malfunctions in this film. That is what makes it the most literal treatment of the alignment problem in cinema, and why it has aged better than almost every AI story that came after it. Colossus was specified to…
2001: A Space Odyssey
A hominid discovers that a thigh bone can be swung, kills a rival with it, and throws it into the air in triumph. The bone tumbles against the sky, and Kubrick cuts — to an orbiting satellite, four million years later, m…
Alphaville
The most unsettling science fiction film ever made about a computer contains no special effects, no futuristic sets, no technology that did not already exist when the camera rolled. Godard shot Alphaville in 1965 Paris —…
Dr. Strangelove
The Doomsday Machine is the purest argument ever staged about automated systems, and it is worth being precise about what the argument actually is. The device works by removing human judgement from the decision to retali…
Fail Safe
Fail Safe arrived in 1964, the same year as Dr. Strangelove, treating the same source material — a mechanical error that sends nuclear bombers past the point of no return — and asking the same structural question: what h…
Desk Set
In 1957, the year Sputnik went up, Hollywood released a romantic comedy about a reference librarian being replaced by a computer. Bunny Watson and her three colleagues sit in the research department of a television netwo…
Modern Times
The opening title of Modern Times announces a story of industry, of individual enterprise, humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness, and then cuts to sheep being herded through a gate and workers emerging from a su…
Metropolis
Metropolis is the first film to take a management theory and build it as architecture. The city is stacked: intellect on top, hands underneath, and a hundred metres of rock in between so that neither has to look at the o…