As AI and automation rise into mass consciousness, it is worth revisiting this Michael Crichton film from 1984 which points out that if a tool is made universal, it will also be hacked by some dark actors.

Featuring Chaim Witz (Gene Simmons) as the evil bad guy in a truly menacing portrayal, the movie opens with a series of attacks by robots, which in this futuristic but stuck in 1980s format world have become ubiquitous at doing daily tasks and construction work.

Naturally, this shows us a different world where humans move alone among the machines and any betrayal by those machines could upend the entire social order. Featuring heat-seeking death drones, scurrilous hacking, and most of all a confrontation with the oblivion that easy living induces, the movie is not so much terrifying in visuals as unsettling in implication.

Like most Crichton films, the emphasis is on tight plotting that reveals the helplessness of humans against the twists of history written into technology, and offers a melancholic sense of unease for anyone considering the automated world about to descend upon us.

Tags: AI, cinema, michael crichton, runaway, tom selleck