Colossus: The Forbin Project

5/17/2026 at 8:17:12 AM

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.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbuster_(entertainment)#Bl...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_on_a_Wire

by whilenot-dev

5/17/2026 at 7:24:35 PM

Yeah, Star Wars more or less killed sci-fi as we had known it. I liked the weird Logan's Run, the depiction of class stratification in "Soylent Green", the banality of corporate control of "Rollerball".

The idea of a computer virus in the film "Westworld" was, to me at the time, something out of left field. (And speaking of Michael Crichton, "The Andromeda Strain" was "intelligent" sci-fi and we enjoyed it.)

"Mad Max", though it came after "Star Wars", drew inspiration from "A Boy and His Dog", "Deathrace 2000"…

A Golden Age for sure.

by JKCalhoun

5/17/2026 at 11:58:57 PM

Plenty of interesting sci-fi later, though. Gattaca, Ex Machina, Her, Interstellar, Inception, The Matrix, Contact, Arrival, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind...

by DennisP

5/18/2026 at 1:37:51 AM

Oh yeh i grew up on a lot of those; add Silent Running in as well!

by trebligdivad

5/18/2026 at 3:23:35 AM

1950 through 1987 were very good years for Science Fiction Movies and TV shows particularly the 1960s.

One show that wasn’t exactly science fiction but was really good was the Prisoner with Patrick McGowan.

They are still very good anthology Science Fiction being written, but unfortunately Hollywood today isn’t doing that many – adaptations as usual Hollywood doesn’t like hire writers outside Hollywood.

by Danox

5/18/2026 at 3:32:06 AM

The line is actually "HOW MANY NIGHTS A WEEK DO YOU REQUIRE A WOMAN?" and was cut from the broadcast version.[0]

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064177/alternateversions/

by exidy

5/18/2026 at 12:49:16 AM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphaville_(film) fits in there, too.

As does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirteenth_Floor which is sort of a remake of World on a Wire(coming from Simulacron III).

by LargoLasskhyfv

5/17/2026 at 9:45:02 AM

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.

by ndsipa_pomu

5/17/2026 at 10:54:46 AM

If you enjoy this age of SciFi and don't mind radio drama rather than film, then X-1 is well worth checking out. It's a 1955- radio drama with a different short story each episode, quite a few stories from well recognised authors.

https://archive.org/details/OTRR_X_Minus_One_Singles

by BuildTheRobots

5/18/2026 at 4:10:40 AM

"The 13th Floor" is another version of that story.

by WalterBright

5/17/2026 at 10:45:54 AM

I find that one over-long and sometimes shoddily done. The payoff at the end is nice though. Fassbinder, the director, was obsessed with his work and made a lot of "legendary" films, but never really made them up to the highest standards.

by ahartmetz

5/18/2026 at 2:48:47 AM

Readers (who haven't hearof it) might also be interested in a short story (published 1909) by E. M. Forster called "The Machine Stops".

It "predicted technologies and cultural impacts similar to instant messaging, social media, and the Internet." (WPedia)

Apart from a 10-minute UK TV adaptation in 2009, ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1451714/ ) text and audiobook versions are widespread.

by 8bitsrule

5/18/2026 at 4:15:24 AM

"5 years of Caltech in 5 minutes" elicited a huge laugh from movie night at Caltech in the 70s.

by WalterBright

5/17/2026 at 5:18:24 AM

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!"

by aizk

5/17/2026 at 6:28:32 PM

I rewatched this recently; I think it held up well. It’s probably re-entered the zeitgeist given the recent developments in “AI” and “agents”. So far accidents seem to have destroyed only data, but it’s only a matter of time before some fool hooks up an “AI agent” to a missile.

Much of the film was shot at the Lawrence Hall of Science in the hills above Berkeley, California. This building was probably chosen because of its unique brutalist hexagonal architecture. I spent a bunch of time there as a kid.

Eric Braeden (Forbin) is still alive, but his house in Pacific Palisades burned down in the 2025 fires. :-(

by smarks

5/18/2026 at 3:14:42 AM

I took another look at L.H.S. and the buildings have rather more octagons than hexagons. There’s even a decagon-shaped building. Still, the symmetric geometry of the architecture is quite striking.

by smarks

5/17/2026 at 7:15:12 AM

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.

by Animats

5/17/2026 at 5:48:01 PM

I watched it for the first time a few months ago and it totally holds up. Very enjoyable film and more relevant now than ever. It is probably considered a little slow for modern low-attention-span audiences.

by qingcharles

5/17/2026 at 11:05:26 AM

>Definitely see this. The 1970s hardware is archaic, but the concept is still relevant.

Indeed. There is nothing in the film that contradicts the notion of Colossus being a very, very large LLM.

Although I think the film is even better than the book by D. F. Jones, only the latter mentions how, despite being created specifically for US national defense, Colossus is also fed unrelated data including Shakespeare's sonnets, because its creators do not know if it could be important.

by TMWNN

5/17/2026 at 10:02:19 PM

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Fanfic/LeftBeyond I wrote this in 2015, it... fits. I'm fairly proud of myself for predicting model collapse.

by spiritplumber

5/17/2026 at 3:08:04 PM

The film is very much better than the book. The sequel books, however, are not good. At all.

by foobiekr

5/17/2026 at 7:24:48 PM

Yes. Spoiler: Mars attacks. Really.

by Animats

5/17/2026 at 8:50:51 PM

I could live with Mars attacks. The portrayal of Colossus' inhumanity was unbearably sadistic. I can understand why it was never made into a movie.

by II2II

5/17/2026 at 11:10:23 AM

(No spoilers)

I had 2 main fridge-logic issues which made it very difficult for me to suspend disbelief and limited my enjoyment of the film:

First: Colossus' is only able to implement its plan because the US, and US-aligned nuclear powers, agree to subordinate their entire nuclear arsenals to Colossus' full-authority defence control, with no means of overriding it; and with its computing hardware sealed in an impenetrable fortress (no maintenance access?).

Second: Colossus' plan - and its ultimate actions - assume everyone else on earth is a nuclear-disarmed-rational-actor, all solely interested in not-dying-at-Colossus's-hand - which is an unworkable assumption.

Unfortunately, the story is driven by these 2 points - without either then the film's story would just be yet-another-cliché-movie where the plucky humans beat the advanced AI overlord, the end.

---------

I still like _Colossus_ because it's "different" to all the other 20th century films with an AI character (c.f. tripe like Will Smith's _I, Robot_ or the Matrix sequels).

by DaiPlusPlus

5/17/2026 at 11:39:24 AM

Point #1 might seem unrealistic, but it's exactly how IT security of most companies operate now: "We are concerned about malware so we give full control of our systems to CrowdStrike". That is, having a single point of failure is shocking common.

by killerstorm

5/17/2026 at 11:54:49 AM

I've worked with companies whose infosec dept. is little more than "see tool alert, ask user what's going on", and then keep searching for the right _tool_ than injecting any human agency in that loop.

If any role is ready for an LLM to take over (or even a shell script), it's that one.

by michaelcampbell

5/17/2026 at 9:44:17 PM

Both of these are better addressed in the books. It was an intentional choice to have no override and no maintenance access. And book 2, Colossus and the Crab, actually spends a bunch of time with Colossus testing the rationality of various humans.

by coderintherye

5/17/2026 at 12:59:06 PM

> Second: Colossus' plan - and its ultimate actions - assume everyone else on earth is a nuclear-disarmed-rational-actor

The plan would still work. Colossus couldn’t be destroyed with nuclear weapons and would retaliate against any attack. It could force compliance of conventional forces as well, and force automation on them, also force populations to rearm it.

In the end, the population would appreciate the eradication of poverty, hunger, disease, and the surplus from not maintaining military capabilities. Colossus could afford democratic institutions while acting as a guard rail against humanity’s worst impulses.

by rbanffy

5/17/2026 at 1:12:46 PM

Colossus was not a panopticon, it was operating on limited intelligence and information about the world. Now, consider a hypothetical secret and clandestine science and engineering team (think: Black Mesa East) could exist completely hidden from Colossus and fabricate a workable fission bomb, then place and detonate it somewhere as a false-flag attack that Colossus would act against.

...or even just from recent middle-eastern history: an outrageous death-cult militant faction like ISIS.

by DaiPlusPlus

5/17/2026 at 4:14:11 PM

Colossus didn’t have infinite intelligence, so it might be possible to hide an effort like that. Not trivial though, as it would have satellite surveillance and likely cooperation from governments who fear what it could do as a retribution. This incentive should be sufficient to make governments police violent activist groups.

by rbanffy

5/17/2026 at 12:47:55 PM

> difficult for me to suspend disbelief

Were you able to suspend your disbelief when watching Idiocracy [1], either in the year of its release or in the subsequent decades? (^;

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy

by heresie-dabord

5/17/2026 at 7:34:53 PM

You are rational. There are plenty of moments where doing the rational thing would end the story.

You are not the president of the United States. That is Donald Trump.

Do you see how the plot is consistent?

by lowbloodsugar

5/17/2026 at 4:45:49 AM

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.

by JKCalhoun

5/17/2026 at 10:39:39 AM

The trilogy of books are interesting, but there is some very dubious sexual exploitation as an entirely unnecessary plot point.

by ideonode

5/17/2026 at 1:38:53 PM

> there is some very dubious sexual exploitation as an entirely unnecessary plot point.

Taking the thinnest of fair slivers, I think that's reasonably common in pre-(80s?90s?00s?) sci-fi/fantasy.

by zimpenfish

5/17/2026 at 2:52:36 PM

"entirely unnecessary plot point"

Are you sure it is dubious?

Woman used as sexual party favors still happens in real life today. Since it is a common weakness, why can't an AI exploit that.

Some might say our own government is now in control of a foreign government, purely on exploiting that weakness. So it is realistic tactic.

by FrustratedMonky

5/17/2026 at 9:17:34 PM

> Are you sure it is dubious?

You'd have to ask 'ideonode who actually said that, not me.

by zimpenfish

5/17/2026 at 7:05:36 AM

>I would love to see the whole trilogy filmed.

Just hope that it is not Christopher Nolan.

by qsera

5/17/2026 at 7:40:04 AM

why?

by WillPostForFood

5/17/2026 at 10:13:31 AM

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.

by ndsipa_pomu

5/17/2026 at 11:04:21 AM

Yeah half of his films are super flashy and quite watchable but you really have to turn your brain off to avoid thinking "what? that makes no sense" constantly. Inception, Tenet & Interstellar at least.

by IshKebab

5/17/2026 at 11:32:27 AM

… and turn on the subtitles ‘cause they can’t be bothered to mix for legibility.

It’s suicide, that’s what it is.

For years the American culture industry has the advantage on its home court that people in other countries would watch our movies with subtitles but Americans wouldn’t watch other countries’ movies with subtitles.

Now the sound mixing of American films has gotten so bad that Americans have been trained to watch with the subtitles on and once you do you might as well watch Italian crime dramas or subprime anime on Tubi.

by PaulHoule

5/17/2026 at 5:23:59 PM

I have no comment on sound mixing in general, but just to add context here, Chris Nolan intended[0] for the dialogue in some of the scenes to be inaudible over the score.

I think this is often difficult for people who treat films as logical instead of experiential.

Nonetheless, it is inaccurate to characterise it as poorly mixed, since the goal was for the score to somewhat drown out the dialogue, and the mixing achieves that goal. You can disagree that this is a desirable outcome for the viewer, but art is ultimately subjective.

0 - https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/cjtlzp/comment/evg2js...

by rglynn

5/17/2026 at 5:58:12 PM

Quality reference there.

by IshKebab

5/17/2026 at 4:01:12 PM

Perhaps because these movies were mixed for theaters with very specific digital sound setups and now lots of people see them for the first time at home.

by georgeecollins

5/17/2026 at 4:22:29 PM

No, it’s the same issue in theaters.

by layer8

5/17/2026 at 11:40:52 PM

To be fair, the problem of matching to soundtracks to people's real listening environments is not entirely solved. That is, back in the DVD a lot of DVDs had a weak 5.1 mix because it was designed to sound OK if you played it back on a 2-channel system so you wouldn't really use the center channel. Then in the Blu-Ray age they got more aggressive with the 5.1 track at risk that you'd miss the dialog if your settings weren't right.

So on top of movies that aren't legible in the theater there is plenty of trouble that comes up in the mixing for home theater.

by PaulHoule

5/18/2026 at 2:28:29 AM

[dead]

by cindyllm

5/17/2026 at 4:38:05 PM

Yeah I've seen them in theatres. Doesn't really help.

by IshKebab

5/18/2026 at 12:03:51 AM

Nolan makes cerebral films for dumb people. I find most of them to be entertaining and fun, but they do lean a bit too much into profundity as a vibe without a whole lot of actual substance.

by zzzbra

5/17/2026 at 12:22:17 PM

Traditional action movies: Turn off your brains and have fun. Christopher Nolan movies: Turn off your brains, and at the same time feel intellectual/smart!

by qsera

5/17/2026 at 11:05:55 AM

> The film was based on the first book of a trilogy.

Although I think the film is even better than the book by D. F. Jones, only the latter mentions how, despite being created specifically for US national defense, Colossus is also fed unrelated data including Shakespeare's sonnets, because its creators do not know if it could be important.

by TMWNN

5/17/2026 at 8:51:56 AM

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.

by smackeyacky

5/17/2026 at 6:13:56 PM

The short scene where they are in the "computer room" and the operator mentions that they lost the entire history of 14th century painting, or something like that. So relevant to contemporary memory holes and wholesale data losses.

by euroderf

5/17/2026 at 7:35:15 PM

I'm surprised that the font used for the "Rollerball" title wasn't mentioned at typesetinthefuture.com

by chiph

5/17/2026 at 9:48:34 AM

"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.

by ndsipa_pomu

5/17/2026 at 10:16:31 AM

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.

by smackeyacky

5/17/2026 at 7:21:24 PM

Whilst it's not in the spirit of getting younger people to appreciate older scifi, you could always mention the Jenny Agutter nude scene.

by ndsipa_pomu

5/18/2026 at 1:28:50 AM

logan's run is too bad of a movie to be anything else, sadly.

by iririririr

5/17/2026 at 7:09:38 AM

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)

by RajT88

5/17/2026 at 7:57:29 AM

The "Demon Seed" book was creepier (and a lot more pervy) than the movie.

by vogelke

5/17/2026 at 8:08:29 AM

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.

by RajT88

5/17/2026 at 8:37:16 AM

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.

by NoMoreNicksLeft

5/17/2026 at 8:17:11 AM

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.

by aspenmayer

5/17/2026 at 4:43:13 AM

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!

by jameslars

5/17/2026 at 11:17:51 AM

Now watch Person of Interest and then name your computer Samaritan.

by zombot

5/17/2026 at 8:41:00 AM

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.

by ricksunny

5/17/2026 at 11:31:12 AM

I've always wondered if it was perhaps the inspiration for the novel Neuromancer (2 AI's in different continents plotting to combine with each other to form a global super-intelligence)

by briansm

5/17/2026 at 6:15:31 PM

Great film, but I think it suffered at the box office because of the klunky title.

by euroderf

5/17/2026 at 12:58:51 PM

A favorite film of mine. I was very happy when a decent quality bluray became available a few years back. I know someone who uses "Warn. There is another system." as an alternative to "Hello, world".

I've wondered if D.F.Jones knew of the British Colossus code breaking system and named his computer that to tweak the security people. They couldn't really object, since Colossus was still a secret. Jones was in the British military and it's not impossible that he knew of the project.

by rootbear

5/17/2026 at 5:01:20 PM

And when that movie played on the Caltech campus in the early 70s, everyone waited for the point when the US and Russian computer started exchanging a private language and one engineer exclaims "That's like five years at Caltech in thirty seconds!" The entire theatre exploded and my ears hurt from the screams.

by tacon

5/17/2026 at 8:58:20 AM

Also see: Failsafe. An earlier film.

Both seem to be influences of War Games.

by timmg

5/17/2026 at 2:43:17 PM

Add: Watch Failsafe and Dr. Strangelove back to back.

by whycome

5/17/2026 at 10:18:25 AM

They remade Fail Safe in 2000 as a TV movie, but the 1964 original is the better film.

by ndsipa_pomu

5/17/2026 at 5:44:53 AM

Yeah, agent guardrails has been an issue for a long time now :)

by bronlund

5/17/2026 at 8:24:22 AM

fyi: https://telehack.com/

by mayli

5/17/2026 at 2:21:23 PM

meet the man forbin himself live in relay only on telehack live mas

by cerebrum01

5/17/2026 at 12:14:22 PM

Great film. I would like to see a remake in modern terms

by madduci

5/18/2026 at 1:31:30 AM

off topic, but i should mention; this post caused the opposite of a slash-dot-effect.

The torrent now have over 50 seeders from the usual 5.

Thanks, i guess.

by iririririr

5/17/2026 at 12:24:26 PM

I came to this film late. Somehow, despite being quite active at the time of its release, I never knew of it until a colleague turned me onto it in the 90s.

Watching it with the benefit of 20 years of history, the influence on subsequent films, like Skynet, was obvious.

I loved the film, and think fondly of my departed colleague when it is mentioned, but I can't bear to watch it often. Like Cassandra, sci-fi films keep showing us a path that we should avoid and as a society we keep saying "Oooh! Candy!" and barreling down that path.

I never thought I'd witness a Butlerian revolution but I'm expecting that next.

by squeedles

5/17/2026 at 7:15:49 PM

Anyone made this connection? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_(supercomputer)

by benjamaan

5/17/2026 at 9:25:45 PM

It's a well known movie, I'm pretty sure that Elon was either inspired by the movie or by the British code breaking computer from WWII. Frankly, I forgot about the movie (saw it in late 2000s), and assumed the inspiration came from the UK :)

by rembal

5/17/2026 at 7:15:14 PM

I thought US was going to be about how uncanny this is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_(supercomputer)

by benjamaan

5/17/2026 at 1:42:01 PM

Reminds me of Alex from "The Bionic Woman" Doomsday Is Tomorrow: Part 2 (TV Episode 1977)

Actually, found it online :)

by SilentM68

5/17/2026 at 5:48:39 AM

This movie is not available as video-on-demand where I live. I could rent it on DVD though. And buy a DVD player.

by cubefox

5/17/2026 at 6:45:29 AM

https://archive.org/details/colossus-the-forbin-project-1970...

by aspenmayer

5/17/2026 at 7:43:41 AM

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.

by cubefox

5/17/2026 at 4:29:27 AM

[flagged]

by sarim

5/17/2026 at 5:47:43 AM

This movie is a terrible bore, but the concept and set is awesome.

by righthand

5/17/2026 at 9:35:15 PM

Lol okay cult film lovers. Give me something besides boring technical dialogue and three-at-most set pieces. You’ll have terrible taste, that’s fine. Doesn’t make the movie “good”. A little more honesty and a little less evangelism for concepts would make HN healthy place instead of a dead af opinion drop for wanna be successful swes.

by righthand

5/17/2026 at 5:08:09 AM

The GOAT.

by transfire

5/17/2026 at 7:52:16 AM

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.

by dsign