Technology Will Kill Us: Dystopian Tech

Sure you love your iPhone now...but soon our technology will be so advance it just might lead to our doom. Scared yet? In honor of the upcoming film Terminator: Genisys, we decided to look at the past films where technology proved to be a worthy adversary against humanity.

The Matrix

Warner Bros.

The Matrix calls into question if our perceptions of reality are even real. In the film humans are unknowingly trapped within a computer simulation, The Matrix, where they continue living “normal lives” but in reality are being harvested for their bio-electric energy by the machines. Prior to being trapped within The Matrix humanity waged a war against the intelligent machines they had created. Because of humanity’s lost, and the machines needing to find a new source of energy, humans were put into The Matrix. Only a few human rebels remained and must fight the machines on both fronts – in the real world against the machines and within The Matrix against the Agents, empowered sentient programs created by the machines to destroy anomalies within The Matrix.

I, Robot

20th Century Fox

In I, Robot society has developed humanoid robots to assist with their everyday living. All robots are programmed so that they are unable to cause harm to humanity or by inaction let harm befall upon them. But when the central artificial intelligence computer, named VIKI, decides that humanity has put itself on a course for extinction her programming goes into overdrive and she takes over all robots and begins to strip humanity of its free will.

Blade Runner

Warner Bros.

In the world of Blade Runner humans have created bioengineered beings called replicants who are virtually identical to humans. The only way to differ humans from replicants is to administer the “Voight-Kamp” test, which provokes and examines the emotional responses of the subjects. The “Blade Runner,” whose job is to hunt down and destroy replicants, is called upon when four replicants illegally land on Earth in hopes of extending their short lives. The replicants continue their rampage as they destroy anything and anyone who try to get in their way and stop them from achieving their goals.

Oblivion

Universal Pictures

Oblivion is set in the aftermath of a nuclear war and humanity has left Earth to settle on Saturn’s moon Titan with the assistance of the “Tet,” a large space station. Jack Harper is one of the last remaining humans on Earth protecting the power generators, along with drones, from the aliens called “Skavs.” But when the Skavs turn out to be humans and his drones turn against him Jack slowly begins to realize the truth. That the Tet is a hostile alien force mining the Earth’s resources and that in the past he had been captured, brainwashed, and cloned by the alien force. To make matters worse – the nuclear war that devastated Earth was caused an army of Jack clones that the alien force had unleashed on Earth.

Terminator

Orion Pictures

In Terminator, two beings time travel from the future to the past looking for a woman named Sarah Connor. A human resistance fighter named Kyle Reese and a cyborg assassin named the Terminator. Sarah learns from Kyle that in the future an artificial intelligence defence network called Skynet will become self-aware and unleash a nuclear holocaust on mankind. The leader of the human resistance in the future happens to be John Connor, Sarah Connor’s future son. With the human resistance on the verge of winning Skynet sent the Terminator to the past to kill Sarah which would prevent the birth of John and the formation of the human resistance in the future.