How Do You Want the Machine to Scare You?

With fears rising lately regarding AI, it's perhaps edifying to look back on how the topic manifested in fiction in the past. The 1993 episode of The X-Files called "Ghost in the Machine" depicts an AI gone mad and killing people by electrocuting them and sabotaging elevators. Oh, well. It's a fun episode.

The first scene feels like it comes from a much cheaper show. Two actors have dialogue in a room lit like a department store where someone got light bulbs just a bit below the requisite wattage. Both actors are conspicuously dubbed giving the scene a feeling like a foreign commercial that was imported to the U.S. Like a Mentos commercial basically.

The evil AI, called "C.O.S." for "Central Operating System", constructs a voice synthesizer for itself to announce its every action like a Dalek; "DELETE! DELETE!" But the influence here is unabashedly 2001; COS starts borrowing lines directly from HAL at the end. One of the writers of the episode later said he was unhappy with it and blamed his own computer illiteracy.

I will say Mulder comes off as especially cool in the episode. I really liked a scene where a security gate comes down on Mulder and Scully's car as they try to enter a parking garage. It sets off the car horn and Mulder gets out of the car, opens the hood, switches off the horn, and says, "So much for the element of surprise." It's kind of an Indiana Jones moment of competence and ruefulness. He needed this after the episode where he was chasing the naked lady.

The X-Files is available on Disney+ in Japan, I think on Hulu elsewhere.