A 70-year-old science fiction film offers a stark warning for today’s AI race, showing how powerful technology can amplify humanity’s most destructive impulses.

This year marks the 70th anniversary of MGM’s release of Forbidden Planet, a film that would become a classic of the sci-fi genre. Shot in CinemaScope and Eastmancolor, it was groundbreaking with its advanced special effects, electronic music score and its setting entirely on a far-away planet. It also had a challenging theme that, in the age of AI, has new – and chilling – relevance.

In the film, the United Planets starship C-57D arrives on the planet Altair IV to investigate the fate of an expedition sent there 20 years earlier. The crew discover that all members of the expedition are dead, except for two – a father, Morbius, and his daughter, Altaira.

As Morbius explains to the ship’s crew, the planet had previously been inhabited by a highly advanced civilisation called the Krell. Beneath the surface of their planet, the Krell had built the ‘ultimate machine’. A kind of mother of all data centres, it was massive, powered by thousands of thermonuclear reactors and capable of maintaining and repairing itself over the 200,000 years since the entire Krell population mysteriously and suddenly disappeared.

The machine had made the Krell super-intelligent, with the technology providing every individual with God-like powers. Morbius, himself, experimented with the Krell technology,........

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