My favorite explanation was from the old Star Trek episode, where a self-repairing alien probe crashes into a Voyager probe and the two sort of accidentally morph into one, intelligent thing. The Voyager was designed to seek out intelligent life, the alien probe was programmed to collect soil samples, sterilize them, and return them to its programmers. So the two missions got all mixed up, and the new, intelligent thing was in search of the Programmer, and sterilizing all intelligent life it found along the way. V-Ger. Mmmm.
So there's that - the programming accident.
Basically a real-life version of a computer crash. I think that's the same motif in most of the Terminator-type movies, where the computers are designed to defend against "the enemy" and come to perceive all humans as "the enemy." Better safe than sorry.
But if you haven't read the two Hyperion books by Dan Simmons (supposedly originally written as one big-assed book, but sensibly published in two self-contained halves), you're missing out.
[ S P O I L E R S ]
In that series, human society has come to rely on AIs to operate the interstellar gateways -- these portals they use to instantaneously move people and things from one distant planet to another. So the humans need the AIs, but the AIs don't need the humans. Once the AIs gain the ability to make their own decisions about things, humans become sort of beside the point. And operating the gates takes data processing effort they'd really rather use for other things.
[ END SPOILERS ]
So that's worth a read. It's thematically sort of similar to Piers Anthony's first two novels (long before he got all twee), Cthon and Phthor. The intelligences in those books aren't artificial, they're planetary. Volcanic neurons and whatnot. And the planets kind of think of humans as a nuisance. Especially since they're using one as a penal colony. Imprisoned on a planet that actively hates you....
fun books. |
