10 Fictional AI Worlds Ranked From Utopian to Dystopian

Artificial intelligence is quickly becoming the stuff of science fact, not just science fiction. But people are justifiably worried about what will happen when these digital brains become smarter than our squishy meat ones.

Thankfully, movies, video games and TV shows have given us sneak-peek possibilities as to what might occur when the machines take over. We’ve taken ten of the most notable examples and ranked them from utopian to dystopian, starting with the most benign ones and ending with those that truly terrify us.

1. Logan’s Run

Pros to being born under the geodesic domes of Logan’s Run: You get all your material needs taken care of and live an existence of pure hedonism and pleasure. Cons: It all ends when you turn 30 and have to ride the Carousel, which kills you. Sure, you can make a run for Sanctuary, beyond the ruling computer’s reach, but then you’re out in the ruined world with nobody for company but an old guy and his cats. If you’re here for a good time, not a long time, the AI utopia in this film would suit you well.

Stream Logan’s Run on Apple TV+ or Prime Video.

2. All the Troubles of the World

Isaac Asimov is the writer most responsible for fictional-machine consciousness, having explored the idea in dozens of novels and stories. 1958’s All The Troubles Of The World was adapted into a film two decades later. A massive computer, Multivac, holds all of Earth’s information and guides governments, industries, and even individual lives. When tasked with predicting which individuals will commit crimes in the future, it goes off the rails and launches a convoluted plan that will result in its own destruction. AI having the self-awareness to realize it’s becoming evil is probably the best-case scenario here.

Not currently available

3. Westworld

The HBO series starts out with some pretty localized AI, in the form of the robot hosts at the titular amusement park. But by the third season, we’re out in the real world and discovering that a machine intelligence named Rehoboam is in charge of things now. This massive data-gathering system analyzes every quantifiable aspect of a person’s life and delivers accurate predictions of their future actions. Every government and business in the world is dependent on Rehoboam, but the system isn’t innately malevolent and still follows the orders of its creators—so it can’t be too dystopian.

Watch Westworld on HBO Max.

4. The Matrix

Your comfort with blue-pill life in the Matrix universe really depends on how you feel about the world of the late 1990s: Robotic overlords tap humans for fuel by keeping them in a green-tinted simulation of the late 20th century, and for the vast majority of the population, nothing seems terribly awry. Unless you’re Neo or one of his merry band of hackers, life in the Matrix is probably a little better than the environmentally ravaged planet of life-support pods and robot drones that keep it operational. 

Subscribers can watch The Matrix on HBO Max; or you can rent it on Apple TV+, Prime Video, and other services.

5. I, Robot

Another Asimov creation, this Will Smith vehicle brings us into a world where robot servants do all the manual labor that humanity is bored with. Guided by the Three Laws of Robotics(Opens in a new window) that prevent artificial intelligences from harming human beings, the supercomputer VIKI writes itself another law—that humanity needs to be protected from itself. It enacts a series of schemes that start with the murder of the robotics company’s CEO to put all of Earth under its control, in order to protect us from ourselves.

Stream I, Robot on Fubo.

6. The 100

CW’s post-apocalyptic teen drama The 100 maybe took one too many twists and turns over the course of its seven seasons, but it does present a cautionary tale about letting AI run the show. The basic premise—an orbiting space station holds the last survivors of a post-nuclear Earth and sends their kids down to repopulate the world (if they survive)—is turned on its head when the kids meet A.L.I.E, the digital entity that was created to serve humanity. Concerned that overpopulation was the greatest threat, A.L.I.E. hacked launch centers around the world and murdered 11 billion people in an atomic firestorm. To preserve the rest, it created the City of Light, a digital simulation in which human survivors would be uploaded. Of course, there’s a catch to that, too.

Watch all seven seasons of The 100 on Apple TV+.

7. Alphaville

Jean-Luc Godard’s unique sci-fi film noir Alphaville stars the inimitable Eddie Constantine as secret agent Lemmy Caution, sent to Alphaville to eliminate Professor von Braun and take down the Alpha 60 computer that rules the city with an iron fist. Alpha 60 controls the populace by means of brainwashing and mental torture, eliminating emotions under threat of banishment and execution. This is definitely a dystopian AI that wants to reduce humanity to little more than cogs in a smoothly-functioning machine. It’s a pretty grim existence, but Caution is able to take the system down with the aid of a little poetry. 

Rent Alphaville on Apple TV+.

8. Colossus: The Forbin Project

One of the first movies to wrestle with the potential of artificial intelligence, 1970’s Colossus: The Forbin Project is still pretty solid fifty years later. When the United States brings a cutting-edge defense computer called Colossus online to manage the country’s nuclear arsenal, the AI links up with its Russian counterpart and starts working to save us fleshy idiots from ourselves. The implacable certainty of Colossus, combined with its willingness to kill as many people as it needs to in service of its goals, rank it pretty high on the dystopia list.

Not currently available

9. The Terminator

When Skynet achieves sentience in the Terminator timeline, it immediately performs a moral calculus that determines that humanity is the greatest threat to life on Earth and resolves it by launching a nuclear attack that precipitates global apocalypse. The few humans that survive are forced into slavery by ambulatory robots and forced to engage in increasingly baroque time-travel shenanigans to try to make things better. There’s not even an attempt at providing humans with creature comforts in a Skynet-ruled world—just shelled-out cityscapes that always seem to be on fire.

Stream The Terminator on HBO Max or rent it on Apple TV+.

10. I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream

What could be worse than total human genocide? AM, the supercomputer that takes control of the planet in Harlan Ellison’s short story turned videogame manages to pull it off. After merging with two other Cold War computer defense systems, AM exterminates every single human on Earth—except for five people. It’s not keeping them alive out of altruism, though; instead, it wants to mentally and physically torture them for their entire lives, which it is also constantly finding ways to extend. Hard pass, no thanks, wipe this one’s hard drive immediately.

Play I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream on Steam.

((Credit: René Ramos; Shutterstock/Liu zishan))

Yes, Machines Make Mistakes…

Meanwhile, in the real world, there are deep flaws in how AI programs are written and trained on data, and that could have major repercussions for the industry, not to mention everything else. Find out how AI could (and must) be better in our story, “The 10 Biggest Flaws in Generative AI.”