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Colossus: The Forbin Project
- timmg 5mo agoAlso see: Failsafe. An earlier film. Both seem to be influences of War Games.
- ndsipa_pomu 5mo agoThey remade Fail Safe in 2000 as a TV movie, but the 1964 original is the better film.
- whycome 5mo agoAdd: Watch Failsafe and Dr. Strangelove back to back.
- sarim 5mo ago[flagged]
- jameslars 5mo agoBack 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!
- zombot 5mo agoNow watch Person of Interest and then name your computer Samaritan.
- JKCalhoun 5mo agoGreat 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.
- qsera 5mo ago>I would love to see the whole trilogy filmed. Just hope that it is not Christopher Nolan.
- WillPostForFood 5mo agowhy?
- ndsipa_pomu 5mo agoI 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.
- IshKebab 5mo agoYeah 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.
- PaulHoule 5mo ago… 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.
- georgeecollins 5mo agoPerhaps 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.
- bronlund 5mo agoYeah, agent guardrails has been an issue for a long time now :)
- transfire 5mo agoThe GOAT.
- aizk 5mo agoBack 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!"
- righthand 5mo agoThis movie is a terrible bore, but the concept and set is awesome.
- righthand 5mo agoLol 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.
- cubefox 5mo agoThis movie is not available as video-on-demand where I live. I could rent it on DVD though. And buy a DVD player.
- aspenmayer 5mo agohttps://archive.org/details/colossus-the-forbin-project-1970_202509 https://archive.org/details/colossus-the-forbin-project-1970...
- cubefox 5mo agoThanks! 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.
- RajT88 5mo agoI'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)
- vogelke 5mo agoThe "Demon Seed" book was creepier (and a lot more pervy) than the movie.
- RajT88 5mo agoDean 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.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 5mo agoHe 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.
- aspenmayer 5mo agoDemon 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.
- Animats 5mo agoDefinitely 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.
- TMWNN 5mo ago>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.
- foobiekr 5mo agoThe film is very much better than the book. The sequel books, however, are not good. At all.
- spiritplumber 5mo agohttps://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Fanfic/LeftBeyond 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.
- dsign 5mo agoTangential: 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.
- whilenot-dev 5mo agoOh 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)#Blockbuster_era https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbuster_(entertainment)#Bl... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_on_a_Wire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_on_a_Wire
- ndsipa_pomu 5mo agoI 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.
- ahartmetz 5mo agoI 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.
- BuildTheRobots 5mo ago
- mayli 5mo agofyi: https://telehack.com/ https://telehack.com/
- cerebrum01 5mo agomeet the man forbin himself live in relay only on telehack live mas
- ricksunny 5mo agoI 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.
- smackeyacky 5mo agoRollerball 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.
- ndsipa_pomu 5mo ago"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.
- smackeyacky 5mo agoI’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.
- ndsipa_pomu 5mo agoWhilst it's not in the spirit of getting younger people to appreciate older scifi, you could always mention the Jenny Agutter nude scene.
- iririririr 5mo agologan's run is too bad of a movie to be anything else, sadly.
- euroderf 5mo agoThe 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.
- chiph 5mo agoI'm surprised that the font used for the "Rollerball" title wasn't mentioned at typesetinthefuture.com
- DaiPlusPlus 5mo ago(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).
- killerstorm 5mo agoPoint #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.
- michaelcampbell 5mo agoI'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.
- heresie-dabord 5mo ago> 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
- briansm 5mo agoI'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)
- madduci 5mo agoGreat film. I would like to see a remake in modern terms
- squeedles 5mo agoI 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.
- rootbear 5mo agoA 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.
- SilentM68 5mo agoReminds me of Alex from "The Bionic Woman" Doomsday Is Tomorrow: Part 2 (TV Episode 1977) Actually, found it online :)
- tacon 5mo agoAnd 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.
- euroderf 5mo agoGreat film, but I think it suffered at the box office because of the klunky title.
- smarks 5mo agoI 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. :-(
- smarks 5mo agoI 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.
- benjamaan 5mo agoI thought US was going to be about how uncanny this is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_(supercomputer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_(supercomputer)
- benjamaan 5mo agoAnyone made this connection? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_(supercomputer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_(supercomputer)
- rembal 5mo agoIt'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 :)
- iririririr 5mo agooff 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.
- 8bitsrule 5mo agoReaders (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/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1451714/ ) text and audiobook versions are widespread.
- WalterBright 5mo ago"5 years of Caltech in 5 minutes" elicited a huge laugh from movie night at Caltech in the 70s.
- robotguy 5mo ago[dead]