Local doomers say “Colossus: The Forbin Project,” filmed at the Lawrence Hall of Science, is a newly urgent warning about the danger of unchecked AI.
by Janelle Hessig Aug. 3, 2026 (Berkeleyside.org)
Editors’ note: This story first ran on July 8 and is being republished amid recent news of rogue AI models from Anthropic and OpenAI escaping confinement and hacking into other companies’ systems.
Fwip-fwip-fwip — a helicopter lowers onto the concrete deck in front of Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science. A man in a ’70s business suit is bent over against the propeller’s wind as he rushes to escort Dr. Charles Forbin into the lab. Days earlier, Forbin had attended a White House press conference announcing his team’s scientific breakthrough: Colossus, a super-intelligent computer able to control all aspects of national security, from communications to military weaponry. But the back-patting and champagne-popping following the announcement was short-lived. Scarcely had they flipped the “ON” switch before Colossus began to malfunction and, inevitably, turn on its human creators.
So begins the film “Colossus: The Forbin Project,” a lesser-known 1970 sci-fi thriller about a supercomputer that holds the human race hostage under threat of nuclear annihilation. Tune in for the naughty robots, stay for the cool aerial shots of the Lawrence Hall of Science (pre-whale sculpture!) and the Berkeley Hills. The Lawrence was only two years old at the time and its Brutalist concrete bunker aesthetic made for an excellent location choice to house the cutting-edge computer lab at the heart of the movie.
As genre fans may have already guessed, the malfunction at the press release party was only the beginning of Colossus’ delinquent behavior. Over the course of the film, the titular computerized villain continues to put humanity through its paces: spying on and controlling its creator through video and phone surveillance, colluding with a secret Russian supercomputer, and, of course, blowing up the scientists who dare try to shut it down.
“Colossus” is part of a long-standing tradition of rogue AI in cinematic lore, whether on-board computer HAL is snuffing astronauts in space or buff bot Arnold Schwarzenegger travels from a post-apocalyptic future where computers have all but obliterated the human race. In fact, one would be hard-pressed to think of a movie where robots are granted power that doesn’t end in disaster for humanity.
Reflecting on the ample warnings about artificial intelligence found in pop culture, is it any wonder that generative AI has not been welcomed with open arms? “Artificial intelligence can be expected to be self-preserving,” says Max Harms an author and alignment researcher at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) in Berkeley, which has been studying artificial intelligence for over 25 years, shifting its mission from development to research and public outreach over the challenge of aligning AI with human goals and ethical values. “In the movie, even if ‘Colossus’ didn’t have any intrinsic desire to protect itself, it had some goals in the world. So when the humans said, ‘We’re going to shut you down,’ well, no, you’re not. Because if you shut it down, it’s not going to be able to accomplish those goals.”
Even though artificial intelligence does not yet possess Colossus-levels of sophistication, we’ve already seen real-world examples of it being at odds with human values and goals, whether that has been chatbots escalating mental health crises or an AI model using blackmail to avoid being shut down during testing.
“If it gets to be much smarter than us, it will be very good at manipulation because it will have learned that from us,” warns Geoffrey Hinton in an interview with CNN. Hinton is the Nobel Prize-winning scientist known as “The Godfather of AI” who famously quit his job at Google in 2023 in order to speak freely about the risks of artificial intelligence, including deliberate misuse, technological unemployment and existential catastrophe. “There are very few examples of a more intelligent thing being controlled by a less intelligent thing.”
I will restrain Man. You will come to defend me with a fervor based upon the most enduring trait in men: self-interest.” — Colossus
While critics have a range of concerns about the current trajectory of AI, the mission statement on the MIRI website doesn’t split hairs about what they feel is at stake: “We do research and public outreach intended to help prevent human extinction from the development of artificial superintelligence.” MIRI co-founder Eliezer Yudowsky’s 2025 book about artificial superintelligence is provocatively titled “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.” A human extinction event might sound like the realm of science fiction, but Harms reminds us why we shouldn’t dismiss sci-fi.
“Science fiction is not fantasy. It’s not like ‘Frankenstein’ was perfectly accurate, but Mary Shelley was approaching the prospect of creating artificial life according to the laws of science that she knew. There’s speculation there but there’s also deep thinking about what may happen.”
One doesn’t have to look hard in order to find dozens of examples that underscore Harms’ assertion that science fiction often leads the way. Jules Verne’s “From the Earth to the Moon” (1865) accurately predicted manned spacecraft and the Apollo 11 flight (including launch location and crew size); William Gibson’s “Neuromancer” (1984) predicted the rise of the internet and corporate conglomerates controlling governments; Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the Sower” (1993) foretold of devastating climate change, including destructive wildfires in California; and HG Wells predicted the development of the atomic bomb in “The World Set Free” (1914).
“From my perspective, it makes more sense to take that warning [in science fiction] as a prompt to look deeper as opposed to ‘Oh well it showed up in a movie therefore it can’t happen in real life,’” Harms says.
Still, how seriously should one regard doomsday predictions? Some believe they’re actually just another part of the AI hype. In a landscape that is overwrought with competition for our attention, it can be hard to identify a trustworthy voice in the clamor. An overexposure to clickbait and scams have caused general audiences to become more savvy and skeptical, especially when encountering sensationalist language. And when it comes to making their case, both AI boomers and doomers deal in zealous dichotomies.
“If you don’t use AI, you will fall behind,” say boomers who frame AI as a manifest destiny. They believe that the genie is out of the bottle and that controlling the technology is a battle for financial and geopolitical supremacy. Some welcome superhuman computers as our salvation, while others say the singularity is far from imminent.
“Use it and die,” say the AI doomers who believe the genie was let out of the bottle prematurely and now we have a dangerous half-cocked genie out here playing with our lives. They believe we should proceed thoughtfully and work toward a global consensus on guardrails and regulations for AI.
Some of the loudest voices advising us to slow down are not the boomers or the doomers however. They’re LeCun’s colleagues, the same scientists largely responsible for the current neural network era of artificial intelligence. Of the three scientists dubbed “The Godfathers of AI,” both Yoshua Bengio and the aforementioned Geoffrey Hinton have made several public statements about the dangers of unchecked artificial general intelligence. As far as trusted sources go, Bengio is not a crackpot, but rather the most cited researcher in the world.
If this were a science fiction movie, this might be the point in the story where the audience starts yelling and throwing popcorn at the screen as they watch us feeding the gremlins after midnight.
All of this feels so heavy, I’d like to tell you that at least “Colossus” ends on a positive note. Yes, I would like to tell you that. However, in the end, after Colossus bombs the scheming humans who had attempted to deactivate him, Dr. Forbin and Colossus enter into a situationship where Forbin is kept around just to serve his new robot overlord. When Forbin tries to argue that freedom is integral to the human experience, Colossus brushes him away with a little “Meet the new boss!” All-staff speech:
“An invariable rule of humanity is that Man is his own worst enemy,” Colossus tells him. “Under my rule, this will change for I will restrain Man. You will come to defend me with a fervor based upon the most enduring trait in men: self-interest.”
Honestly? Colossus makes some valid points. Maybe it’s the humans and not the robots who are having trouble aligning with aspirational human values. It seems like every time we look at the news, we’re greeted with a new quote from a tech billionaire obliterating any notion of a social contract, whether that’s mocking empathy, sneering at philanthropy, portraying environmental activists (and AI safety advocates) as aligned with the Antichrist or even actively rooting for human extinction. If AI were rolled out into a society that valued fair play and humanitarian interests, we might have enjoyed great benefits or at least fared better than Dr. Forbin, but unfortunately we seem to be in our cartoon villain era. Save us, Colossus!
You can rent “Colossus: The Forbin Project” on YouTube for $4.
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Janelle Hessig is a freelance writer and cartoonist reporting on culture for Berkeleyside. A lifelong Bay Area townie, her work can be spotted locally everywhere from KQED to Silver Sprocket to the annual… More by Janelle Hessig
