Who's afraid of artificial intelligence?

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carino. For almost a century, people have been getting freaked out by movie portrayals of AI.

Back in 1968, there was Hal 9000 in 2001, a Space Odyssey.

I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that. The 80s gave us SkyNet in the Terminator.

I'll be back.

And these days movies about Rogue Bots are more popular than ever. Films like 2022's Megan and this

summers Afraid seem to be channeling our worst fears of the intelligent technology increasingly embedded in our daily lives.

Shera Oviday is a tech reporter for the Washington Post and she recently wrote about

why AI is such a compelling horror villain.

Boy, I wish we had an army of psychologists to look at this question and it's something that I have been asking for a very long time.

And you know one of the things that I've heard is we have these dual feelings about

artificial intelligence and other technologies, right?

We're wowed by it, we're sort of amazed at the idea of flying cars or robots that can do our laundry

or artificial computers that can outthink humans or drive cars better than humans.

At the same time, that feels terrifying and out of our control, right? To have some. time that

feels terrifying and out of our control right to have something that out humans

humans or that is so powerful and emotionless, right, that it's not,

it's not encumbered by our human,

either physical or emotional frailty.

So I do think that duality of these technologies and especially these artificial intelligence technologies, it does make us feel weird.

Right, which I mean that's kind of the description of like the concept of the uncanny valley, right?

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