User:Dave Young/rm/1-2/Colossus-Imaginary-Futures

During the Cold War, the representation of computers in science fiction varied from docile cyborg-servants to tyrannous megalomaniacs capable of taking over the world. As the vast majority of innovation in the computer industry was led by military funding, the sinister background of the development of these new machines seeped down into the collective consciousness through the discourse of popular culture. In his book Imaginary Futures, Richard Barbrook argues that the public representation of technology was burdened with an ideological imagining of the future: a computer was not simply presented as an autonomous contemporary object, but rather a projection of the future successes of Capitalism. Complex arrays of blinking lights and whirring tape spools communicated to the naïve subject the promises of what the United States had in store for its citizens. According to Barbrook, the exhibition value of the technologies celebrated at the 1964 World's Fair in New York had to be masked, as to unveil the true purposes of space rockets, computer mainframes and nuclear power would horrify the public and shatter the promise of post-war ideological stability. "The propagandists of both sides justified the enormous waste of resources on the arms race by promoting the peaceful applications of the leading Cold War technologies. By the time that the 1964 New York World’s Fair opened, the weaponry of genocide had been successfully repackaged into people-friendly products."[38] Despite the repackaging of computer technologies as exciting futuristic curiosities, there remained an ambivalent fascination with a “loss of control” over such machinery in the science-fiction genre. Such themes are very clear in the film Colossus (1970), within which the technological anxieties and paranoid fears of the era are articulated, illustrating the perils of entrusting the defensive strategies of a country to a sentient machine.

Looking back on literary fiction, Hollywood cinema and the print media at the height of the Cold War, it is apparent that there was a market for paranoid musings about the devastating possibilities of entering into nuclear warfare with Russia. The basis of this paranoia was the new post-war ideologies of cybernetics and the information society – ideologies that rendered humans as mechanistic devices whose mass-actions could be predicted by mathematics and computers as humanised heuristic devices that would evolve and eventually become sentient. The technological battleground – one of the many fronts which the United States fought Russia throughout the Cold War – was fuelled by paranoid knowledge: the egotistical desire to attain an object due to the fact that the object is already owned by another. In this case, the need to have the most powerful machines capable of the most sophisticated defence mechanisms to impress and frighten the opposition into inaction. While these objectives were being attained, they were also being leaked to the news media as a means of distributing propaganda, in order to remind the American people that their country promised the better 'imaginary future'.

In the United States, the rapid developments in computer technologies were applied as a mass-control interface, enabling the military to “plan the destruction of Russian cities, organise the invasion of 'unfriendly' countries, […] and pay the wages of its troops and manage its supply chain.” [Barbrook, 41] The computer was also seen as an important political tool to analyse the rapidly increasing quantities of data from sources such as the U.S census. With the use of computers, the statistics could be processed much quicker, and be presented in a more comprehensible manner to the policy-makers in order to shorten the temporal-gap between survey and action. This cybernetic concept of data-flow management created an important but largely covert function for computers that only led to a greater level of mystification around them in popular culture. It is perhaps easy to forget that for most Americans, their experience of computers would have been limited to science-fiction and mediated news reports. In Imaginary Futures, Barbrook describes how some of the biggest computer companies such as IBM tried to create a public facade to illustrate the amiable wonderment of their machines on exhibition at the 1964 World Fair in New York: “The only hint of the corporation's massive involvement in fighting the Cold War was the presence of the computer which could translate Russian into English.” [53] The fact that IBM displayed a subservient computer based on Robby the Robot from the film Forbidden Planet illustrates their desire to disconnect the public consciousness from the secret bunkers and missile trajectories associated with computers in the popular science-fiction of the time. [Barbook, 16]

In the film Colossus: The Forbin Project, an 'alternative present' to the year 1970 is imagined through a thematic exploration of control and authority with relation to computer technologies and artificial intelligence. The film follows the American development of a secret project to construct a cybernetic machine capable of controlling all the nuclear missile silos around the country and act as an early warning system against a Russian attack. The machine, codenamed Colossus, was designed by the protagonist Dr Forbin as a cybernetic entity with heuristic reprogramming and data processing technologies. The computer, according to Dr Forbin, could operate at such a high level that it could predict another country's future offensive manoeuvre against the United States and automatically retaliate. In the film, Colossus rapidly increases in processing power, and quickly realises that the Russian's have secretly constructed an equivalent machine named Guardian. The machines become networked, and they begin to communicate between each other and decide to take control of their human-operators, threatening them with launching missiles at strategic targets if their demands are not met.

The film articulates the Cold War preoccupation with apocalyptic 'possibilities' and the suspicion of military-led technological innovation, specifically the realisation of the fear of the sentient machine inverting man/machine power relations. The military interest in artificial intelligence had existed during Alan Turing's time at Bletchely Park, when he envisioned the future creation of a computer that would be modelled on the human brain. Richard Barbrook writes about how Alan Turing's theories of artificial intelligence greatly influenced the mathematician John von Neumann: “Just like Turing, this prophet also believed that continual improvements in hardware must eventually culminate in the emergence of artificial intelligence.” [51] Von Neumann applied a right-wing reading to cybernetics, and working predominantly for the American military during the 1950s and 1960s, would have investigated the possibilities and potentials of realising such technologies. Despite Colossus' aesthetic jargon and, at times, degeneration into farce, there is a curious foresight in its exploration of man's relationship with technology, especially considering the film was created before the time of the computer's domestication. It could in fact be argued that the anxieties articulated within the film were visions not of an imaginary future, but the present we find ourselves in today.