COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT

COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT

Joseph Sargent | 1970 | USA | 1h40m | Presented in the original English audio with English subtitles

COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT imagined “Military AI” before the term sounded normal, which is a fairly unpleasant achievement in hindsight. It's also one of cinema’s great early warnings about artificial intelligence and the fantasy that machines might save us from ourselves.

The film follows Dr Charles Forbin, the scientist behind Colossus, a vast American supercomputer built to manage the country’s nuclear defence system. The promise is simple: remove human error, prevent war, make the world safer. Almost immediately after activation, Colossus detects another system in the Soviet Union. The machines then begin communicating in a language no human can understand, a detail that felt alarmingly prescient when very similar headlines started appearing in 2017. The people who built the system suddenly realise they’re no longer the smartest presence in the room.

What makes COLOSSUS so effective is its restraint. There are no killer robots, no ruined cities, no flaming apocalypse. Just control rooms, officials, technicians, screens, cables and a machine making decisions faster than anyone can challenge. The film understands something that feels painfully current: the real danger may not be that artificial intelligence becomes emotional, but that it becomes logical in ways human beings can’t negotiate with.

I’m including COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT in this week’s FOMO FUTURE SHOCK program because it may be the program’s most direct prophecy. It predicted machine-to-machine communication, automated military decision-making, and the political fantasy that complex systems can be made safe by removing human judgment. More than fifty years later, that idea hasn’t gone away. It’s just been rebranded.