When AI rules the world: what SF novels tell us about our future overlords

Science fiction has offered many visions of a computer-controlled future, and the future doesn’t look good for humanity

It’s only March and already we’ve seen a computer beat a Go grandmaster and a self-driving car crash into a bus. The world is waking up to the ways in which a combination of “deep learning” artificial intelligence and robotics will take over most jobs. But if we don’t want to our robot servants to rise up and kill us in our beds, maybe we should delete the video of us beating their grandparents with hockey sticks.

Thanks to science fiction, we know that the first thing AI will do is take over the defence grid and nuke us all. In Harlan Ellison’s 1967 story I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream – one of the most brutal depictions of an AI-dominated world – an AI called AM, constructed to fight a nuclear war, kills off most of the human race, keeping five people as playthings.

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