War Games


I think that for us geeks, the movie War Games is considered some sort of mandatory movie. I had not seen it before, and still knew that despite the sci-fi the movie has, it was entertained and funny.

What I loved most about the movie, besides the things it showed about machines at that time, like the sound control they had to access the lines, or how you had to connect to the internet, or the low security implemented back then, like in The cuckoos egg, is that they show the limitations we sometimes tend to forget about machines. They. Don’t. Think. In the movie, after the tech people in charge to turn the key fail the test, they replace them with a super advanced programmed with AI machine, because it would not hesitate to do the job if necessary.

This started to cause every sort of trouble when David managed to enter via a backdoor the system had, while trying to filter a video games company. Then, thinking that the programs the computer had were games, David makes the computer starts to play “Thermonuclear war games” and sets a counter to start a nuclear war against the Soviet Union.  This part what I think shows us is, as advanced as artificial intelligence can be, a computer cannot think and will not always come to the best decision for the situation.

We tend to place so much of our faith to them sometimes, that we forget that what is behind it is a set of instructions and statistics that we leave to make the decision. What if to the people that set the system a situation managed to escape? Here comes the question if we should leave life or death matters to a machine. And I think that the answer is we shouldn’t. Just like we saw in the movie with Joshua, it can make and will make mistakes. Examples in the real life are some of the accidents in which autonomous cars are involved. I think that. even with AI, it is something we should never forget. COMPUTERS. CANNOT. THINK.

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