“President Joe once had a dream/The world held his hand, gave their pledge/So he told them his scheme for a savior machine . . .
Don’t let me stay, don’t let me stay/My logic says burn so send me away/Your minds are too green, I despise all I’ve seen/You can’t stake your lives on a saviour machine.”
—David Bowie, “Saviour Machine,” The Man Who Sold the World (1970)
“The primitive forms of artificial intelligence we already have, have proved very useful. But I think the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”
—Professor Stephen Hawking, BBC interview (2014)
For a long time, Doctor Who has been leading from the front on sci-fi questions such as: Will machines ever be able to think for themselves? Will machines become so powerful they’ll take over the Earth? Doctor Who has a rich history of conjuring stories about intelligent supercomputers that have “woken up” to their power, and begin their bloodthirsty plans for a human downfall.
First and foremost is WOTAN. WOTAN was a voice-operated supercomputer that could think for itself. It was built to serve mankind as a problem solver. And it was linked to all the computers of the Earth. Doctor Who came up with the WOTAN story way back in 1966. That was about the time engineers first worked on the theories that would become the Internet. In the story, WOTAN decides that the world can’t progress with humans in charge. So WOTAN takes over. And humans become its servants. WOTAN even develops the ability to hypnotize humans into doing its bidding. It forces humans to build mobile computers called war machines. And they gain control over humanity.
Sound familiar? Eighteen years later a WOTAN-like intelligence would appear as Skynet in the hit movie The Terminator. The movie even has war machines. And more recently with the Twelfth Doctor, we met Gus, a computer on the Orient Express that forces humans into investigating a creature called the Foretold. When the humans fail, they are eliminated and a new batch is obtained. Gus also thinks for itself and has a personality.
The question of machine intelligence has enjoyed the usual symbiotic relationship between science and sci-fi. Since humans are simply natural machines, who think, could not artificial machines someday do the same? As the industrial revolution burgeoned, British novelist Samuel Butler applied Darwin’s theory of evolution to the emerging machine world. His 1872 novel Erewhon, a deliberate anagram of “nowhere,” tells the tale of a hero who travels to a fictional lost world. Here he finds a society that has banned technological evolution beyond the most basic of levels. Their fear is that the machine would evolve and develop intelligence, soon enslaving their human masters. As Butler writes in Erewhon:
Complex now, but how much simpler and more intelligibly organized may it not come in another hundred thousand years? Or in twenty thousand? For man at present believes that his interest lies in that direction; he spends an incalculable amount of labor and time and thought in making machines breed always better and better; he has already succeeded in effecting much that at one time appeared impossible, and there seem no limits to the results of accumulated improvements if they are allowed to descend with modification from generation to generation.
Incidentally, in the Twelfth Doctor story “Smile,” a population of humans evacuated Earth to form a new colony. The name of the heavy cruiser spaceship used to transport them? Erewhon.
The danger of allowing machines to think was thus explored in sci-fi even before the first depiction of the said machines. Only later, in the 1927 short story The Thought Machine by Ammianus Marcellinus and the 1935 tale The Machine by John W. Campbell, did sci-fi flesh out the machines in detail. In 1946, science began to drive forward these sci-fi visions of machine intelligence. The post-war creation Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) was the first large-scale, electronic, digital computer with the ability to be reprogrammed to decipher various problems. Specifically, the artillery firing tables for the US Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory. A rather inauspicious start as, from the very beginning, the thinking machine is associated with violence and destruction. The Doctor would certainly not approve.
Computer science still lags far behind the sci-fi visions of Doctor Who. This is despite the fact that, at the 1956 conference that founded the field of artificial intelligence, experts believed the creation of human-level machine intelligence was merely a few decades distant. And yet in the expert opinion of Californian think-tank The Institute for the Future, the twenty-first century ahead will be increasingly dominated by intelligent machines. There are even eminent voices that demand sci-fi had it right all along. They divine danger and disaster on future Earth. The world’s greatest scientist, the late Stephen Hawking, previously Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge University, said we face an “intelligence explosion,” as future machines will redesign themselves to be far more intelligent than humans. And perhaps the world’s most famous engineer, the multinational entrepreneur, Elon Musk, has called the potential of artificial intelligence, “our greatest existential threat.” Even self-styled philanthropist Bill Gates, who must surely still recall the odd fact or two about such systems, confessed to be “in the camp that is concerned about superintelligence.”
The world is certainly beginning to feel like the kind of place dreamt up by Doctor Who in the past. We have devices that we can talk to. Software like Siri and Alexa enable us to ask questions and get answers. It’s almost as though Siri and Alexa understand us; most of the time anyhow. Software like this can be used like a personal voice assistant that can store vital data, as well as search for data online. Then there’s modern transport software. We get around using satellite-based navigation systems that automatically reroute if we take the wrong turn. And it won’t be long before we’re “driving” cars that are smart enough to drive themselves. It all seems increasingly machine intelligent. But is any one of these machines anywhere near as clever as a person? Since the 1950s, computers have been pitched against humans in chess battles. As time’s gone on, we’ve lost more and more matches. But this isn’t really a good test of intelligence. And we’re still trying to work out exactly what intelligence is. But one thing’s for sure, the more stuff we get computers to do for us, the more likely they are to be able to drastically affect our lives.
Will intelligent machines become a threat to humans? It may well be that machine intelligence is the next stage of human evolution. Ever since Frankenstein, sci-fi writers have been wise to the double-edged sword of technology, which promises both progress and destruction. When machine intelligence does come of age, and citizens and democracies tackle the human question of developing the tech to reflect the best of us, the rich culture and history of sci-fi like Doctor Who will be invaluable.