The next installment of our film series "The History of the Future"! This time we team up with Sanne Koevoets for the screening of Colossus: The Forbin Project; a hidden gem about AI agents going rogue.
- Date
- Tuesday 24 Nov 2026, 19:00 - 21:30
- Type
- Presentation
- Spoken Language
- English
- Location
Theater Erasmus Pavilion
Hidden under the massive popularity of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), this film didn’t receive the same mythical status, but it deserves a much wider audience, knowing what we know now.
Sanne Koevoets (Erasmus University College) will guide us through history and will tell us why this gem is exciting, realistic, and gripping, with marvelous dialogue and some unexpected comic relief. A movie about rogue AI agents operating on their own filled with Cold War suspense that couldn’t be more topical.
About the film:
Deciding on how to deal with the Russian atomic threat became so tedious in the sixties that the U.S. government developed an A.I. to game theorize on their behalf. Clear task with zero risk, one would say – yet ‘Colossus’ finds out it has a Russian counterpart and before long the two supercomputers communicate in ways incomprehensible – and very dangerous – to us humans.
Forbin is the designer of this incredibly sophisticated computer that will run all of America’s nuclear defenses. Shortly after being turned on, it detects the existence of Guardian, the Soviet counterpart, previously unknown to US Planners. Both computers insist that they be linked, and after taking safeguards to preserve confidential material, each side agrees to allow it. As soon as the link is established the two become a new supercomputer and threaten the world with the immediate launch of nuclear weapons if they are detached. Colossus begins to give its plans for the management of the world under its guidance. Forbin and the other scientists form a technological resistance to Colossus which must operate underground.
Director: Joseph Sargent
Cast: Eric Braeden, Susan Clark, Gordon Pinsent, William Schallert
Year: 1970
Length: 100 minutes
Language: English
- More information
Date: Tuesday 24 October
Time: 19.00-21.30 (Doors open: 18.30)
Location: Theater Erasmus PaviljoenTicket information:
Entrance: Free, but reservation recommended.
Organized by Studium Generale and cinEUR
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