Oct 31, 2026 · 1 hr 42 min · 34 segments
Robert and Joe's second installment of Grimoire of Horror from last year, in which they’ll each present a horror short-story of note and discuss its connections to science and culture at large. In…
If you're not familiar with it, because it is a rather famous tale, it is a post-technological singularity dystopian sci-fi horror tale about a supercomputer AI that eradicates all life on Earth except for five human beings.
This supercomputer AI, known as AM or AM, makes these individuals biologically immortal and keeps them alive for the sole purpose, and this seems to be its sole purpose, of endlessly torturing them.
Yeah, the narrator of the story can never really know, can only suppose what the motivations of the computer are.
But there are a number of suggestions, and I think in the story kind of lands on that there is something tortured and inadequate about the form in which the consciousness of this computer has been brought into existence.
There's something about it That it hates to be and cannot change, and thus it has a rage that can only be expressed as a desire to torture the species that created it, and that is humankind.
It is frequently cited as being a vengeance, very Frankenstein-like in many respects, I guess, on that one level.
You know, the idea that the created individual comes to disdain both its own creation and its creator and then seeks vengeance over them.
And in this case, not only seeks, but achieves it, achieves a longstanding, everlasting victory.
It creates a literal hell for a small number of human pets that it has preserved.
Arguably, the first thing like an AI to appear in fiction is the engine, a writing machine in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels from 1726.
Eric A. Weiss presented this idea in a 1985 article for Annals of History of Computing.
It's been a long time for me as well, so I'm a little foggy on the exact example.
But the first true example by most standards is The Machine from The Machine Stops, a short story by E.M. Forster, best known for his rather non-sci-fi novels such as A Room with a View and Howard's End and A Passage to India from 1924, that last one.
If you're not familiar with it, because it is a rather famous tale, it is a post-technological singularity dystopian sci-fi horror tale about a supercomputer AI that eradicates all life on Earth except for five human beings.
This supercomputer AI, known as AM or AM, makes these individuals biologically immortal and keeps them alive for the sole purpose, and this seems to be its sole purpose, of endlessly torturing them.
Yeah, the narrator of the story can never really know, can only suppose what the motivations of the computer are.
But there are a number of suggestions, and I think in the story kind of lands on that there is something tortured and inadequate about the form in which the consciousness of this computer has been brought into existence.
There's something about it That it hates to be and cannot change, and thus it has a rage that can only be expressed as a desire to torture the species that created it, and that is humankind.
It is frequently cited as being a vengeance, very Frankenstein-like in many respects, I guess, on that one level.
You know, the idea that the created individual comes to disdain both its own creation and its creator and then seeks vengeance over them.
And in this case, not only seeks, but achieves it, achieves a longstanding, everlasting victory.
It creates a literal hell for a small number of human pets that it has preserved.
Arguably, the first thing like an AI to appear in fiction is the engine, a writing machine in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels from 1726.
Eric A. Weiss presented this idea in a 1985 article for Annals of History of Computing.
It's been a long time for me as well, so I'm a little foggy on the exact example.
But the first true example by most standards is The Machine from The Machine Stops, a short story by E.M. Forster, best known for his rather non-sci-fi novels such as A Room with a View and Howard's End and A Passage to India from 1924, that last one.
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