Menace of the Machine: The Rise of AI in Classic Science Fiction (British Library Science Fiction Classics)

'It's a hazardous experiment,' they all said, 'putting in new and untried machinery' Caution beware the menace of the a man is murdered by an automaton built for playing chess; a computer system designed to arbitrate justice develops a taste for iron-fisted, fatal rulings; an AI wreaks havoc on society after removing all censorship from an early form of the internet. Assembled with pieces by SF giants such as Isaac Asimov and Brian W Aldiss as well as the less familiar but no less influential input of earlier science fiction pioneers, this new collection of classic tales contains telling lessons for humankind's gradual march towards life alongside the thinking machine. Technological advance is never straightforward. A man is murdered by an automaton built for chess. A computer system designed to arbitrate justice develops a taste for iron-fisted, fatal rulings. An AI governing what we now know as an internet wreaks havoc on society after removing all forms of censorship. Assembled with parts from the late 19th century to the 1960s, this new collection of classic stories warns of the possible threats, both comic and severe, of a world in which human and machine live side by side. A delightfully, and worryingly, prescient selection for today's world in which robotic coexistence is passing with each day from speculation to reality