Fritz Lang First Depicted Artificial Intelligence on Film in Metropolis (1927), and It Frightened People Even Then – Open Culture

Artificial intelligence seems to have become, as Michael Lewis labeled a previous chapter in the recent history of technology, the new new thing. But human anxieties about it are, if not an old old thing, then at least part of a tradition longer than we may expect. For vivid evidence, look no further than Fritz LangsMetropolis, which brought the very first cinematic depiction of artificial intelligence to theaters in 1927. It imagines a future cleaved in two, where the affluent from lofty skyscrapers rule over a subterranean caste of laborers, writes Synapse Analytics Omar Abo Mosallam. The class tension is so palpable that the invention of a Maschinenmensch (a robot capable of work) upends the social order.

The sheer tirelessness of the Maschinenmensch sows havoc in the city; later, after it takes on the form of a young woman called Maria a transformation you can watch in the clip above it incites workers to rise up and destroy the machines that keep the city functioning. Here, there is a suggestion to associate this new invention with an unraveling of the social order. This robot, whichGuardianfilm critic Peter Bradshaw describes as a brilliant eroticization and fetishization of modern technology, has long beenMetropolis signature figure, more iconic than HAL, Data, and WALLE put together.

Still, those characters all rate mentions of their own in the articles reviewing the history of AI in the movies recently published by the BFI, RT, Pictory, and other outlets besides. The Day the Earth Stood Still, Alien, Blade Runner (and even more so its sequel Blade Runner 2049), Ghost in the Shell, The Matrix, and Ex Machina. Not all of these pictures present their artificially intelligent characters primarily as existential threats to the existing order; the BFIs Georgina Guthrie highlights video essayist-turned-auteur Kogonadas After Yang as an example that treats the role of AI could assume in society as a much more complex indeed, much more human matter.

FromMetropolis toAfter Yang, as RTs Alan Smeaton points out, AI is usually portrayed in movies in a robotic or humanoid-like fashion, presumably because we can easily relate to humanoid and robotic forms. But as the public has come to understand over the past few years, we can perceive a technology as potentially or actually intelligent even it doesnt resemble a human being. Perhaps the age of the fearsome mechanical Art Deco gynoid will never come to pass, but we now feel more keenly than ever both the seductiveness and the threat of Metropolis Maschinenmensch or, as it was named in the original on which the film was based, Futura.

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Based in Seoul,ColinMarshallwrites and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities,the bookThe Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angelesand the video seriesThe City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at@colinmarshallor onFacebook.

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Fritz Lang First Depicted Artificial Intelligence on Film in Metropolis (1927), and It Frightened People Even Then - Open Culture