Sunday, June 3, marked the 41st anniversary of War Games, a film that portrayed the hacker culture of the 80s better than anyone else and, almost 3 decades before ChatGPT a warning about the dangers of letting computers make decisions that affect human beings.
It was in 1983. While Linus Torvalds played with his grandfather's Vic 20 and Richard Stallman took the first steps of the GNU project, Ronald Reagan and Yuri Andropov kept a cold war alive that almost none of us knew that his days were numbered.
41 years of War Games
The film tells the story of David, a teenager whose ability for computers is inversely proportional to his ability for human relationships. Trying to download video games not yet released on the market before anyone else enters the Pentagon and confuses the computer in charge of responding to the USSR attacks into believing that there are missiles about to attack the United States.
With the help of a schoolmate and the creator of the self-defense system, David must stop the computer from launching missiles to respond to the false attack.
The validity of the film
The screenshot that begins this post belongs to an article written by the Artificial Intelligence model Claude 3 Haiku on the topic of this article. As we see, it places emphasis on the new cold war that we are experiencing in which neither Washington nor Moscow are directly opposed but are being fought in territories such as Ukraine or the Middle East. Curiously (Or not) it omits any reference to the dangers of Artificial Intelligence.
A topic that like notes Matías Gutierrez Reto did interest the non-technology press.
The general film reviews, those that were published in newspapers and that we can access today thanks to the web archive, did not place the same focus on the issue of access (authorized or not) to remote time-sharing systems, for the reason that On the contrary, they focused on the role of artificial intelligence in the story that the film tells and the danger of a nuclear conflict, which undoubtedly mobilized a significant dose of concern in the audience of 1983.
The events told in the story would not have been possible if at the beginning of the films human control had not been eliminated due to a supposed slow response in a simulated attack. The irony is that the importance of control by a human being would be demonstrated a few months later, but on the other side of the iron curtain.
At midnight on September 26, 1983, the Soviet Union's ballistic defense systems They alerted the duty officer of the Defense Air Forces that 5 signs indicating unidentified objects were approaching their location. According to everything, those signals were ballistic missiles.
Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrow He decided to disobey the protocol that indicated responding to the attack in the same way. And, in this way, a nuclear war was avoided.
What Petrov, a veteran officer who had been part of the team that oversaw the development of the anti-missile system, took into account is how unlikely it was that a nuclear attack would be carried out with only 5 missiles, that ground radars would not confirm the detection and that the alert would not have previously gone through the 30 established layers of verification.
Basically, Petrov did the same thing that caused them to replace human control with a computer in the movie.
The question we can ask ourselves is If ever Artificial Intelligence models will be able to replace what experience means. In a less dramatic example, compare the capture article with the aforementioned article by Matías, a computer science enthusiast who saw it at the time of its release.
And if you want to see the movie, you can find it on Internet Archive dubbed into Spanish.
War Games was directed by John Badham, starring Matthew Broderick, Ally Sheedy and John Wood and the screenplay was written by Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes.