Thanks for that, Jim compares today's rush to hand military and political decisions to error-prone AI models with the plot of the 1970 film Colossus: The Forbin Project, in which a US president cedes national defence to an AI that seizes control.
We are all living inside of an obscure sci-fi film from 1970
23 Oct, 2026
Imagine that a film was released this year in which the following happened:
An easily led US President is persuaded by a smug, egotistical tech bro to hand over complete control of the nation’s defences to their cutting edge AI model.
This predictably doesn’t go well, the AI seizes more and more power, implementing a surveillance state, carrying out executions and eventually completely usurping human political control.
The smug AI tech bro completely fails to rein things in and eventually just uses the whole mess as an excuse to coerce an employee into having sex with him.
Unless it is a documentary, something so on the nose probably won’t get made any time soon. Fortunately this exact film was already made 56 years ago.
Colossus: The Forbin Project was released in 1970. It was adapted from a 1966 novel by British sci-fi author D.F. Jones named simply, Colossus.
While the film seems to be well appreciated, with respectable scores on sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Letterboxd, it is certainly not well known and could probably be described as obscure, I can’t ever remember seeing it on TV or being discussed alongside the more famous films of the time.
This is a shame, because C:TFP is a solid, paranoid drama touching on techno fetishism and the tensions of the cold war. It features fantastic production design in the cassette futurism aesthetic and might well turn out to be the most prophetic film ever made.
As things kick off, an eerily JFK-esque US president announces that he has placed full responsibility for the defence of his nation in the hands of a supercomputer named Colossus.
The rather smug inventor of Colossus, Charles Forbin, explains that buried in an impenetrable nuclear bunker, Colossus has full autonomous control over American defence capabilities.
The idea is that this will make the US completely safe from the threat of any attack and the President muses that the threat of dispassionate destruction hanging over the planet will probably bring about world peace. Guess how that goes?
To cut a long, but well worth watching, story short, Colossus makes contact with the equivalent Russian AI, grows beyond the control of its creators and uses the threat of nuclear war to get its way. All of Forbin’s attempts to get control fail. Maybe because of mankind’s reckless naivety in the face of a technology that they created but don’t fully understand, or maybe because he is absolutely smashed on frequent, massive martinis.
Under constant surveillance he announces to his staff that the only way he can pass on messages to them is by one of his young female subordinates sleeping with him as that would be the only time that he won’t be watched by the computer. Very convenient.
The film ends with the world under the control of an AI overlord, with a suitably sinister robot voice. No-one looks happy about things.
This all seems far too likely for my liking, but maybe I’m being overly pessimistic. We’d only need to be really worried if there was an ongoing trend of handing over military decision making to a bunch of barely understood and frequently error-prone large language models… and if the whole mess was propped up by the ego and greed of a handful of ketamine fuelled tech entrepreneurs and shamelessly corrupt kleptocrats.
