The extremely rapid development of modern technologies, particularly in the field of artificial
intelligence, raises the need to open up new discourses not only on the relevance of these
technologies for contemporary society, but also on the contextualization of human attitudes
towards these developments. Cinema as a cultural medium makes it possible to understand
and reflect social fantasies, perspectives and fears in given periods of time. This thesis focuses
on a multimodal analysis of selected Hollywood films from the 20th century and their
representation of artificial intelligence as an imagined threat to humanity. By selecting and
deconstructing three selected scenes from the films 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), War
Games (1983), Terminator (1984) and The Matrix (1999), I analyse how these images are
constructed, what they communicate to us, and how they address or evoke a sense of fear in
the viewer in relation to AI and machines. The questions of the thesis are how selected films
from the second half of the 20th century portray AI as a threat, how these representations
reflect the social imaginaries of the time, and what the representations from selected globally
successful films tell us about human attitudes towards new technologies and progress. The
findings revealed that all the selected films draw on and reinforce the fear of AI, portraying AI as violent, insensitive, calculating and existentially dangerous to human society, while forming a discourse of distrust and phobia towards these technologies for the viewer.
|
