By Mark Graham

While 1983’s WarGames was not the first movie to outline the potential dangers of our military’s use of artificial intelligence, it does serve as a helpful reminder that it wasn’t so long ago that the only members of our society that had access to home computers were bleeding edge tech enthusiasts and teenage hacker prodigies like Matthew Broderick. Nowadays, though, we all carry powerful computers powered by AI in our pockets, and some people even use them to communicate with each other about, well, wargames. What could possibly go wrong? Good thing this story, which earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay, is purely fictional and could never happen in real life … right? Right?

Photo: Everett Collection