I’ve always wanted to recommend a few movies for my students to think about societal impact of their work. This semester I am finally doing it, and I’m starting with Wargames, from 1983.
A very young Matthew Broderick plays a young “hacker” that learns about how computers talk to each other, and his curious mind leads him to play a game against an 80s style AI. This AI is realistic in the sense that it learns from different executions (min-maxing strategies, pre-Reinforcement Learning) to estimate the best course of action.
Early in the movie you see him using early modems and connecting directly to any machine in the world via phone number. Later you see him trying some phreaking with a payphone. Too bad he didn’t have a Cap’n Crunch whistle with him.
It also features one of the first uses of hallucination in AI, predating the 1995 origin material. I might be stretching it a little, but it makes whole sense to me.
Finally, there is a message in the movie that critical systems should have a human in the loop as a safeguard. I wonder how many companies and individuals today have the same urge to replace humans with machines in super-critical scenarios. Oh, but machines act immediately, without a second thought.