Tuesday, May 9, 2017

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream can only be described one way - as nightmare fuel. This is beyond the concept of artificial intelligence taking over as robots become sentient. This is a machine built to manage the world becoming sentient. Throw in the horrors of immortality and being trapped and tortured by said artificial intelligence for its only entertainment and you have yourself a terrifying and hopeless scenario with no happy ending. At least, not for the protagonist. 

While there is no happy ending, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is a story of heroism and a warning of the capability of human nature. I don’t want to read too much into it, but the history of AM is that the Cold War broke out into WWIII, and it got so complex that nations built supercomputers to manage the world for them until one gained sentience, took over the others, and killed every human on earth except for five. This story was published in 1968, when the Cold War was still going on. It was perhaps a warning. A warning about how the greed and violence of man can easily escalate into war. 


The antagonist itself, AM, is not necessarily evil by default. I still can’t entirely find a reason for his hatred of humans, but perhaps his creation was enough. In social psychology, terror management theory suggests that when people feel unimportant they equate those feelings with dying—and they will do everything they can, including becoming extreme and destructive themselves to avoid that feeling. Without humans, AM has no purpose. 

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