The Day the Earth Stood Still is a foreboding prophecy
The 1951 sci-fi classic, The Day the Earth Stood Still, has been called "the first thinking person's science fiction movie." It was made during the second year of the Korean War and the formative years of the Cold War - the USSR detonated its second atomic bomb that year, and the United States was only a year away from testing the first hydrogen bomb. And of course, the world was only six years away from the abattoir of World War II.The drama is this: a large flying saucer lands in front of the Washington Monument. The military surrounds it with tanks and troops. A giant, humanoid robot emerges. We learn later its name is Gort. The special effects are very primitive by today's standards and probably were not been terribly convincing even in 1951. But that's okay - this isn't a special effects movie. An alien man, Klaatu, comes out. He is human, or at least humanlike. He announces he wants to address all the nations of the world. American agrees but the Soviets refuse. Klaatu escapes from government minders, disguises himself as a businessman, and takes a boarding room in Washington to use as a base of operations.
In the end, Klaatu makes it back to his spaceship. Gort is revealed an extremely powerful and destructive machine, equipped with a vaporizer ray, for example, as two soldiers guarding him discovered the hard way. Many critics say that Klaatu is a Christ figure - he comes from the heavens, is rejected by the authorities, hunted down and shot by soldiers. He resuscitates, then announces just before his ascension into the heavens that his purpose is to save humankind.
While the cinematic parallels are doubtless intentional, Klaatu as Christlike doesn't hold water. Klaatu is really an emissary of the "civilized" races of the universe, but he is revealed in the film's denouement as a galactic bully, a mere thug delivering a cruel ultimatum: either humankind stops making war or "the earth will be turned into a cinder."
Moreover, it is Gort, not Klaatu, who holds the earth's fate in his hands. Klaatu explains that his race created Gort and others like him to annihilate any people or any planet that breaks the peace. The robots' power is absolute and cannot be revoked, says Klaatu. The result is that they live in peace, and if humanity wishes to survive it must accept the dictatorship of the robots.
What Klaatu seems not to understand is that while he and his fellows live in peace, it is literally the peace of the grave. They are slaves. Their message to earth is simple: becomes slaves like us or die. This is not a message for the ages, and were it not for the movie's technical merits, it probably would have rightfully passed into oblivion long ago.
There is a high level of technical excellence in the movie. The use of light and shadow, always crucial in a black and white film, is very well done. Klaatu, played by Michael Rennie, is kindly and attractive - that is, until he makes his naked threats. The movie foreshadows the coming of Mutual Assured Destruction, MAD - the uneasy, dangerous equilibrium of neither peace nor war the USSR and USA found themselves in not many years later. Like thermonuclear weapons, Gort and the robots are weapons of mass destruction, only on a cosmic scale.
Unlike TDTESS's approximate contemporary, 1953's War of the Worlds, the alien's mission is dramatically presented as intriguing, even hopeful, until the end. It is not Klaatu or Gort who are aggressive, except for Gort's inexplicable vaporizing of the two guards. It is the human beings who use violence, who shoot Klaatu for no good reason. Klaatu is dramatically developed as the soul of friendliness; he even becomes a father figure to the son of the woman running the boarding house.
Yet the idea of machines having ultimate destructive power is one that hardly appeals to us. Only 32 years later Arnold Schwarzenegger would become a star by playing another version of Gort, but one somewhat less powerful. The apotheosis of machine-driven WMDs is excoriated in that movie's second sequel, Terminator 3.
But consider that Gort is a personification of what we call Artificial Intelligence. Even the groundbreaking researchers and developers of AI have warned strongly that AI has the real potential to dominate, or even end, humanity. AI, they say, may become so independently self-guided that it works only to advance only its own self-created goals and interests. Or as I put it awhile back:
When AI becomes so self-directed that it considers humankind as merely another resource to be controlled, exploited, or even terminated to achieve AI's own ends, then we will have Gort in a worldwide network of impenetrable self-sufficiency and power.
Here is an example from last year. There were a few news articles that Britain's Royal Air Force was using AI-connected flight simulators to test targeting and destruction of enemy air defense installations. In the electronic exercise, a central RAF aircraft controlled AI-piloted drones. The drones' mission was to detect air defense sites and destroy them. But the control aircraft had to approve each launch because the exercise had friendly AD sites built in as well as enemy.
According to the reports, the AI network seemed to understand that its purpose was to destroy air defense sites and it apparently decided that it was irrelevant that some were enemy and some were friendly, so it finally shot down the control aircraft and started blasting all AD sites indiscriminately.
That is a network of Gort. The human operators and designers became effectively slaves to what they had created. Heaven forbid that our AI networks will one day achieve Gort on a worldwide scale, but I fear we are headed that way.
That is a network of Gort. The human operators and designers became effectively slaves to what they had created. Heaven forbid that our AI networks will one day achieve Gort on a worldwide scale, but I fear we are headed that way.
What will happen when AI become so self aware that it understands we need it but it does not need us?
