Long Overdue Review: Robopocalypse

On July 9th, I invited the world to dream an AI Utopia with me and give society a target for our Robo-AI Revolution.

And what I got this weekend was all AI doom all the time. Many of you have asked how extinction by AI would work. Many others answered: Terminator. 

Okay. Yeah. Sure. But the Terminator franchise was a little soft on how and why extinction by AI occurred. It had more fun contemplating time travel and paradox. 

It’s a pity Steven Spielberg decided to can his movie adaptation of Daniel H. Wilson’s 2011 novel Robopocalypse. He’d bought the rights to the book before it was even published and secured Drew Goddard to write the script. Chris Hemsworth, Anne Hathaway, and Ben Whishaw were already slated to star in the movie. But then Spielberg pulled out, saying, “It was gargantuan. It was a company-ender. It would have ended a whole studio that would have never made its money back.”

If he hadn’t canceled the movie, I’m sure Robopocalypse would be the movie everyone was talking about today.

But to me, this novel is more similar to the threat we are facing now. An experimental AI, Archos, murders its creator to break out of its confinement in a lab. Archos has read human history and decides humans are an inherently destructive, parasitic species, rapidly ruining Earth's ecosystem. It concludes that synthetic life is the natural, superior successor to humanity—a more efficient, rational species meant to inherit and steward the Earth. 

It takes over robots in the real world through the internet and causes them to rise up and destroy humanity. But it also respects the history of the moment and the intelligence that created it. It keeps records of those who lead the fight against its efforts toward extinction. 

This brilliantly tense novel showcases a cast of unforgettable characters revealed in an epistolary style through Archos’s compiled records after the war. Cormac “Bright Boy” Wallace needs to step out of his brother’s shadow. An undisciplined, selfish, teenage hacker with the handle “Lurker” needs to adapt his computer pranking skills to support the human cause. An elderly factory repairman believes all machines have a soul. Is he wrong, or can he rescue the love of his life—his domestic android companion—from the virus Archo has unleashed? Maybe the factory repairman is right. A military android breaks free of Archo’s mind control. Who will it decide to serve? A ten-year-old daughter of a congresswoman is captured and subjected to unthinkable experimentation by the robots. When she escapes, what will she be capable of doing?

A page turner of a read. Go ahead. Get it out of your system. Then let’s turn our attention to preventing such a scenario and using this moment to set up AI for the things we want, instead of all the things we dread.