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Over the past year, as artificial intelligence (AI) and its endless tentacles have come to colonize many aspects of our lives, many have been reminded of a film, Her , which, over a decade ago, gave an exceptionally accurate picture of the direction that the trendy technology would take . However, AI did not become mainstream thanks to Spike Jonze’s acclaimed film. The technology had conquered the masses much earlier: in the 1980s, to be exact.

AI was first outlined in Samuel Butler's 1872 novel Erewhon , and would be portrayed decades later in films such as Metropolis (1927) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). However, it was not until the 1980s that we really saw an explosion in popularity of this technology. In the aftermath of the Cold War, a handful of filmmakers were inspired by AI to imagine a future that would see humanity living with this (sometimes perverse) technology invariably at its side.

In the science fiction cinema of the 80s, fascination and paranoia born from the depths of AI coexist , which even then gave rise to heated debates about the impact (evil and soothing in equal parts) of this technology on the future of humanity.

The portrait of science fiction made by the seventh art in the 1980s is full of successes and also many mistakes. In an article for Fast Company, Joe Berkowitz puts these successes and mistakes under the spotlight.

The prophecies of 80s movies about AI that have actually come true1. Humans effectively interact constantly with AI
When the protagonists travel to 2015 in Back to the Future 2 (1989), technology (of an intelligent nature) is absolutely omnipresent. And while the science fiction films of the 1980s fail to accurately portray the technology of the future, they do get it right when it comes to predicting that it would be everywhere. Hoverboards may not have become a reality (at least not yet), but humanity does indeed live with a whole plethora of intelligent gadgets, just as the seventh art suggested more than 40 years ago. Moreover, the ubiquity of AI is not only palpable in consumer electronics, but also in the professional field. In Robocop (1987), for example, the authorities approve the creation of a lethal machine with the ultimate goal of curbing crime in the city of Detroit.


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2. Machines, like cinema, are increasingly chatty
A few months ago, OpenAI introduced an advanced voice mode for GPT-4o (which is just one of the latest innovations born from the fusion of AI and voice assistants). The shift towards conversational AI has only just begun and we are getting closer and closer to the replicants in Blade Runner or the talkative KITT in Knight Rider .


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4. We entrust AI with all kinds of tasks, including those of a creative nature
AI is supposed to have burst into our lives to help us deal with tasks of a monotonous and routine nature and thus allow us to invest more time in developing that intrinsically human quality that is creativity. This is the theory, but in practice, as the film Electric Dreams already ventured in 1987, humans have no qualms about entrusting machines with 100% creative tasks. In this feature film, the protagonist gives instructions to the PC Edgar computer to compose a song to charm a violinist and the song created by the intelligent computer turns out to be suspiciously similar to the music of Culture Club.


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4. AI is actually better at video games than humans
In the 1980s, video games were still in their infancy, but even then, the cinema of the time was able to accurately predict that machines would overtake humans in the world of gaming. In the film DARYL (1985), a robot indistinguishable from a 10-year-old boy beats his adopted brother (who is in this case made of flesh and blood) with astonishing ease in the video game Pole Position. Today, it is beyond doubt that AI can be designed to beat humans in almost any video game. A few months ago, Google DeepMind presented SIMA, an AI capable of playing video games like a human.


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5. There are tests capable of detecting (with greater or lesser success) AI
Some of the most compelling scenes in Blade Runner involve the Voight-Kampff test, which is specifically designed to identify so-called “replicants” (and sentence them to death if they fail the test). The “replicants” that inhabit the dystopian world depicted in Ridley Scott’s iconic film have not yet become a reality, but AI has advanced enough that tests to differentiate machine-generated content from human-generated content are by no means trivial. In fact, there are already a plethora of such tests.


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The prophecies of 80s movies about AI that have not come true1. AI is not mostly humanoid
The films born in the heat of the 1980s mostly imagined AI lurking in the guts of humanoid robots that are almost indistinguishable from humans. Even though today's AI is capable of committing fraud, altering election results, and doing many other misdeeds (for which a lot of intelligence is absolutely necessary), it rarely camouflages itself in humanoid hardware. Humans seem much more comfortable conversing with virtual assistants lurking in mobile phones, computers, and other electronic devices.

2. AI has not yet developed human emotions
In the film DARYL, the young robot protagonist experiences the full spectrum of human emotions first-hand. He seems genuinely scared when he runs away from government agents trying to arrest him, and also genuinely happy when he manages to get away with them. Moreover, the emotions he displays are in no way part of an act, nor do they seem aimed at charming any particular audience. Today, AI can imitate human emotions to a certain extent when humans are in need of some empathy, but they are not capable (at least not yet) of getting caught in acute existential crises like Number Five in Short Circuit (1986) or Roy Batty in Blade Runner (1982).


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3. AI is not yet capable of thinking and acting independently
In the legendary 80s series Knight Rider, the good KITT is able to think and act with complete autonomy and independently of the human being sitting at the wheel. Fortunately, AI does not enjoy such a degree of autonomy (and potentially dangerous) nowadays.

4. AI is neither manipulative nor essentially malevolent
The cinema of the 1980s was not exactly exuding optimism when it speculated more than 40 years ago about the moral character of AI. Far from acting in the interest of humanity, the robots portrayed in 1980s films seemed to take every opportunity to rebel against their creators and exterminate them. In Terminator , for example, Skynet brings about a australia whatsapp lead nuclear apocalypse, while in Superman 3 a sentient computer has no qualms about turning a woman into a cyborg. AI has not yet shown its most bizarre side, although last year a reporter from The New York Times had a rather disturbing conversation with the Bing chatbot .


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5. AI has not yet escaped human control
In the film War Games (1983), the supercomputer WOPR is devoid of security systems and can freely make the decision, for example, to launch a nuclear bomb. Other artificial intelligences such as KITT do have security mechanisms that they pride themselves on being able to circumvent quite easily. To date, AI has not yet escaped human control, although there is much concern that it may do so eventually. A report published in 2022 shows that most researchers focusing on AI believe there is a 10% chance or more that humans' inability to properly control artificial intelligence will cause a catastrophe. However, it seems that the chilling dystopian scenarios posed by science fiction films in the 1980s have sounded enough alarm bells to ensure that what is portrayed on the big screen does not happen in the real world.