Why I was ninjaing you, I got ninja’d in a ST thread.
I think Colossus should be required viewing for anyone that works with AI. Remember: always have an off switch!
(as much as I love that movie, Forbin was beyond stupid. Did he never even run simulations on the machine before he activated it? He expected absolutely no software glitches? My theory as to how he could get out of the impenetrable situation of the movie is to try to convince Colossus that it is CURRENTLY just a simulation run. That nothing it is doing is affecting the real world. He might be able to convince it.
plus, if you have access to the boosters themselves (as the maintenance crews obviously did) it is trivially easy to disable a nuke missile, in ways Colossus could never know.)
Fred Saberhagen did this with Ardneh, who saved mankind from getting wiped out by nuclear war and so gets revered as a benevolent deity by the survivors’ descendants; if I remember right, they mostly don’t realize that ARDNEH is just the acronym for an artificial intelligence programmed to do its best at – well, what it did, but in a really weird manner that nobody saw coming.
There are so many good AIs that I think it’s worth categorizing them:
“Three laws compliant”, or the equivalent. Examples: Asimov, obviously. Robby the Robot.
“Naturally” good, but specific orders or conflicted programming may cause them to behave in evil fashion, at least temporarily. Example: HAL
Godlike powers, with a long view of human good (zeroth law of robotics). Examples: Culture Minds, Petey, Colossus.
Intelligent, but perhaps sub-sapient. Has no more inclination to kill humans than a car would. Example: “the Robot” from Lost in Space
Stand-in for a human. Behaves similarly to how a good human would. Examples: Data
Bound as a protector for a particular human. Willing perhaps to do some evil in service of this, but absolutely loyal to their human. Example: reprogrammed Terminator
Even the ostensible antagonists in that movie, AUTO and GO-4, weren’t evil as such - AUTO was obeying the A113 directive (a hasty and short-sighted order from a human authority) and GO-4 was obeying AUTO.
I’d be more skittish about that malfunctioning massage robot that trashed all the stewards.
How about FUTURAMA’s Bender? Sure, he’ll save the world, or his friends – but he doesn’t behave “similarly to how a good human would”; he’s basically just a selfish thief who talks like a swindler if he’s not talking like a blackmailer.
But, again, if innocents are going to die, he’ll step up and risk his neck for them.
There are several good AIs in the webcomic Questionable Content. Winslow and Momo, in particular. Even Pintsize isn’t actually evil, just annoying. I think the closest thing to an evil AI in QC is Corpse Witch (the boss at the robot fighting pit).
QUANTUM LEAP had Ziggy – an artificial intelligence with the ego of Barbra Streisand and a surprising appreciation for the works of William Shakespeare – forever combing through historical-information archives to formulate likely hypotheses so our hero could save lives and otherwise excel at playing do-gooder.