Oh man, the Golden Age of science fiction movies, just two years after 2001: A Space Odyssey and five years before the start of the Blockbuster era[0] with Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977).
I feel like Science Fiction back then was purely understood as psychological concepts and ambiguous desires, mostly questioning the very essence of reality and our human minds. There were intelligences and ambitions in us that felt alien, but weren't extraterrestrial in kind. I always thought of it as if Science Fiction tried to turn any progress from the Age of Enlightenment inside out.
A great gem is also World on a Wire (1973)[1], which takes the concept of a machine controlled intelligence and questioned whether we're living in a simulation and are already influenced by a virtual world.
My favorite quote from Colossus: The Forbin Project, after Dr. Forbin is held hostage by Colossus:
Colossus: How many nights a week do you require sex?
Dr. Forbin: Every night.
Colossus: Not want. Require...
Dr. Forbin: [looks sheepish] Four times.
I love collecting old SciFi and hadn't heard of "World on a Wire", so am grabbing a copy now (Criterion have a version). I've long been a fan of Colossus as it raises the spectre of being under constant observation (now almost commonplace it seems).
I miss the days when SciFi didn't mean an action film in a future setting that just ends up being the good guy(s) being chased by the bad guy(s).
Edit: Apparently I had heard of World on a Wire, but forgot about it as I've already got a copy as a series rather than a film.
Definitely see this. The 1970s hardware is archaic, but the concept is still relevant.
So is the scale. For the 1980s and 1990s, the huge Colossus system seemed obsolete.
The age of the personal desktop computer had arrived.
Now Colossus looks small compared to Amazon's AI training system from 2025.
I've been joking at work that the 70's was filled with cautionary tales about AI that we should be listening to.
(Except for Demon Seed. That one jumped the shark - but I did love their rendition of what an AI data center looks like)
The "Demon Seed" book was creepier (and a lot more pervy) than the movie.
Dean Koontz? I've read a couple of his books, and I'm not surprised at the suggestion he had bad or awkward sex scenes, but weird rapey AI level awkward? Yikes.
He started off as a porn writer. Awful, atrocious sludge. Wrote most of those under pen names, so it's not provable what is and isn't his, but it's 80% certain on quite a few of them. But that wasn't even uncommon for science fiction writers and scifi-adjacent writers like him.
Demon Seed is schlocky, but it’s perhaps worth watching once. That said, I will readily admit that the film is bad for many reasons. Though horror films aren’t generally known for being inoffensive, the ending is disturbing in content and gratuitous in presentation. Perhaps the film works best as a warning and as a critique, though I’m really scrounging and scraping here. I blame Dean Koontz for the premise of the original novel, though I have no idea why anyone thought that the book needed to be adapted to film, but here I am talking about it.
I’m glad you brought up Demon Seed all the same, as I was reminded of it while reading TFA.
When the computer system from the film commands a character to “open that door, and clean these lenses” in a particular scene, the absurdity and mundanity of being commanded to clean a camera by an AI is subtly horrifying.
For a modern analogue, I’m reminded of DoorDash workers being dispatched to close doors left ajar by passengers of autonomous Waymos.
Back when I worked as a civil engineer I had a coworker named Joe. He was... I think 78. Poor guy didn't save up enough for retirement so he worked a bit part time. He knew the ins and outs of the field better than anyone, but had no idea how to use a computer (he marked up drawings and I put them into CAD). He mentioned this movie to me as AI (gpt) had just become a thing saying "it'll scare the hell out of you", and he recommended I watched it - I'm glad I did!
Great guy, always told funny stories - "I was not a great dad but I was a damn wonderful grandpa!"
Great film, I thought. The ending is quite dark—and then Colossus tells Forbin that he will come to love him…
Turns out it is prescient. The film was based on the first book of a trilogy. You can look up the plot of the following two novels if you want spoilers, but indeed, Forbin does have a reconsideration of Colossus.
I would love to see the whole trilogy filmed.
The trilogy of books are interesting, but there is some very dubious sexual exploitation as an entirely unnecessary plot point.
>I would love to see the whole trilogy filmed.
Just hope that it is not Christopher Nolan.
why?
I would guess that's due to Nolan focussing on great visuals rather than the underlying ideas. I did enjoy The Prestige, but often his stories become somewhat nonsensical e.g. Inception's plot doesn't really make any sense when you look into the characters' motivations etc.
I cottoned onto the film a couple years ago after Ready Player One’s Ernest Cline recommended it on a Weaponized podcast. I like that the exterior facility shots were filmed at Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley. In the film context I really would construe it as projecting some sort of Cold-War era “secure government science facility” architectural archetype. When one learns about the career arc of E.O.Lawrence, the stylistic allusion to Cold War science feels all the more fitting. Viz. Lawrence Livermore lab has the reputation today of being the more secure, clandestine lab, while nearby Lawrence Berkeley Lab (LBL) has the reputation of being the stand-up academic science lab that welcomes international academic all-comers. But prior to Lawrence Livermore’s founding (like while Edward Teller was closer to the then Berkeley Rad Lab, now LBL). And so for several years, 1940s to at least the early 1950s, Berkeley Rad Lab would have been possessed of what would become those same Livermore-esque secure spooky Cold War science vibes.
Rollerball has the central premise that society is outsourcing all decisions to a central computer and everybody just blindly follows, to the point where nobody checks whether it’s functioning properly.
First time I watched it I thought it was beyond far fetched. In the age of LLMs I’m not so sure anymore.
"Logan's Run" is similar, but with the idea pushed further. I think Rollerball is more political in specifically targetting corporations as being malignant forces.
I’ve been trying to get some of my younger colleagues to give both movies a chance without success so far. I think they find it tough to get past the practical effects and old school actor acting.
Back in the late 90s the Michigan Tech CS labs had 2 preferred machines for students to remote into, Colossus and Guardian.
I always enjoyed the reference as well as this movie’s a kid!
Tangential: movies are not necessarily the best medium for cautionary tales about super-intelligence, with their penchant for hiding educated reasoning and their need for showy visual effects that always age poorly but get all the viewer's attention. Writing, on the other hand, can do the trick. The same way American schools have periodic rehearsals for "if a shooter comes," they should have a mandatory exercise to "write your own story that features super-intelligence." It might make the kids think[^1].
[^1]: Even if, or especially if, they let ChatGPT write it.
Also see: Failsafe. An earlier film.
Both seem to be influences of War Games.
They remade Fail Safe in 2000 as a TV movie, but the 1964 original is the better film.
Yeah, agent guardrails has been an issue for a long time now :)
Oh man, the Golden Age of science fiction movies, just two years after 2001: A Space Odyssey and five years before the start of the Blockbuster era[0] with Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977).
I feel like Science Fiction back then was purely understood as psychological concepts and ambiguous desires, mostly questioning the very essence of reality and our human minds. There were intelligences and ambitions in us that felt alien, but weren't extraterrestrial in kind. I always thought of it as if Science Fiction tried to turn any progress from the Age of Enlightenment inside out.
A great gem is also World on a Wire (1973)[1], which takes the concept of a machine controlled intelligence and questioned whether we're living in a simulation and are already influenced by a virtual world.
My favorite quote from Colossus: The Forbin Project, after Dr. Forbin is held hostage by Colossus:
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbuster_(entertainment)#Bl...[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_on_a_Wire
I love collecting old SciFi and hadn't heard of "World on a Wire", so am grabbing a copy now (Criterion have a version). I've long been a fan of Colossus as it raises the spectre of being under constant observation (now almost commonplace it seems).
I miss the days when SciFi didn't mean an action film in a future setting that just ends up being the good guy(s) being chased by the bad guy(s).
Edit: Apparently I had heard of World on a Wire, but forgot about it as I've already got a copy as a series rather than a film.
Definitely see this. The 1970s hardware is archaic, but the concept is still relevant.
So is the scale. For the 1980s and 1990s, the huge Colossus system seemed obsolete. The age of the personal desktop computer had arrived.
Now Colossus looks small compared to Amazon's AI training system from 2025.
I've been joking at work that the 70's was filled with cautionary tales about AI that we should be listening to.
(Except for Demon Seed. That one jumped the shark - but I did love their rendition of what an AI data center looks like)
The "Demon Seed" book was creepier (and a lot more pervy) than the movie.
Dean Koontz? I've read a couple of his books, and I'm not surprised at the suggestion he had bad or awkward sex scenes, but weird rapey AI level awkward? Yikes.
He started off as a porn writer. Awful, atrocious sludge. Wrote most of those under pen names, so it's not provable what is and isn't his, but it's 80% certain on quite a few of them. But that wasn't even uncommon for science fiction writers and scifi-adjacent writers like him.
Demon Seed is schlocky, but it’s perhaps worth watching once. That said, I will readily admit that the film is bad for many reasons. Though horror films aren’t generally known for being inoffensive, the ending is disturbing in content and gratuitous in presentation. Perhaps the film works best as a warning and as a critique, though I’m really scrounging and scraping here. I blame Dean Koontz for the premise of the original novel, though I have no idea why anyone thought that the book needed to be adapted to film, but here I am talking about it.
I’m glad you brought up Demon Seed all the same, as I was reminded of it while reading TFA.
When the computer system from the film commands a character to “open that door, and clean these lenses” in a particular scene, the absurdity and mundanity of being commanded to clean a camera by an AI is subtly horrifying.
For a modern analogue, I’m reminded of DoorDash workers being dispatched to close doors left ajar by passengers of autonomous Waymos.
Back when I worked as a civil engineer I had a coworker named Joe. He was... I think 78. Poor guy didn't save up enough for retirement so he worked a bit part time. He knew the ins and outs of the field better than anyone, but had no idea how to use a computer (he marked up drawings and I put them into CAD). He mentioned this movie to me as AI (gpt) had just become a thing saying "it'll scare the hell out of you", and he recommended I watched it - I'm glad I did! Great guy, always told funny stories - "I was not a great dad but I was a damn wonderful grandpa!"
Great film, I thought. The ending is quite dark—and then Colossus tells Forbin that he will come to love him…
Turns out it is prescient. The film was based on the first book of a trilogy. You can look up the plot of the following two novels if you want spoilers, but indeed, Forbin does have a reconsideration of Colossus.
I would love to see the whole trilogy filmed.
The trilogy of books are interesting, but there is some very dubious sexual exploitation as an entirely unnecessary plot point.
>I would love to see the whole trilogy filmed.
Just hope that it is not Christopher Nolan.
why?
I would guess that's due to Nolan focussing on great visuals rather than the underlying ideas. I did enjoy The Prestige, but often his stories become somewhat nonsensical e.g. Inception's plot doesn't really make any sense when you look into the characters' motivations etc.
I cottoned onto the film a couple years ago after Ready Player One’s Ernest Cline recommended it on a Weaponized podcast. I like that the exterior facility shots were filmed at Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley. In the film context I really would construe it as projecting some sort of Cold-War era “secure government science facility” architectural archetype. When one learns about the career arc of E.O.Lawrence, the stylistic allusion to Cold War science feels all the more fitting. Viz. Lawrence Livermore lab has the reputation today of being the more secure, clandestine lab, while nearby Lawrence Berkeley Lab (LBL) has the reputation of being the stand-up academic science lab that welcomes international academic all-comers. But prior to Lawrence Livermore’s founding (like while Edward Teller was closer to the then Berkeley Rad Lab, now LBL). And so for several years, 1940s to at least the early 1950s, Berkeley Rad Lab would have been possessed of what would become those same Livermore-esque secure spooky Cold War science vibes.
Rollerball has the central premise that society is outsourcing all decisions to a central computer and everybody just blindly follows, to the point where nobody checks whether it’s functioning properly.
First time I watched it I thought it was beyond far fetched. In the age of LLMs I’m not so sure anymore.
"Logan's Run" is similar, but with the idea pushed further. I think Rollerball is more political in specifically targetting corporations as being malignant forces.
I’ve been trying to get some of my younger colleagues to give both movies a chance without success so far. I think they find it tough to get past the practical effects and old school actor acting.
Back in the late 90s the Michigan Tech CS labs had 2 preferred machines for students to remote into, Colossus and Guardian.
I always enjoyed the reference as well as this movie’s a kid!
Tangential: movies are not necessarily the best medium for cautionary tales about super-intelligence, with their penchant for hiding educated reasoning and their need for showy visual effects that always age poorly but get all the viewer's attention. Writing, on the other hand, can do the trick. The same way American schools have periodic rehearsals for "if a shooter comes," they should have a mandatory exercise to "write your own story that features super-intelligence." It might make the kids think[^1].
[^1]: Even if, or especially if, they let ChatGPT write it.
Also see: Failsafe. An earlier film.
Both seem to be influences of War Games.
They remade Fail Safe in 2000 as a TV movie, but the 1964 original is the better film.
Yeah, agent guardrails has been an issue for a long time now :)
fyi: https://telehack.com/
This movie is not available as video-on-demand where I live. I could rent it on DVD though. And buy a DVD player.
https://archive.org/details/colossus-the-forbin-project-1970...
Thanks! Guess I don't have to buy a DVD player for now.
It seems that the people who don't care to make their old movie available as VOD also don't particularly care about copyright violations.
[flagged]
This movie is a terrible bore, but the concept and set is awesome.
The GOAT.