If a distinct picture of a friendly or dangerous robot comes to your mind when you think about artificial intelligence, you’re probably thinking about a robot that you’ve seen in a science fiction movie.

These imagined robots help us hold important conversations about AI — they give us a vision for the potential for incredible good and unspeakable harm that could come from AI research.

At Mind AI, we’ve got a few favorites from blockbuster films of the past few decades. Our core team members explained which fictional AI is their favorite and why.

Paul Lee

Paul Lee, M.D., CEO and Founder

Jarvis from Iron Man. It’s a real competent assistant that can help you save time and energy. Also, the AI from Her is great— real companionship is extremely powerful.

John Doe

John Doe, Chief Scientist

The most scientifically realistic robots in movies I believe would be in the movie Interstellar — TARS and CASE. I thought it was great that you could decide what percentage of truthfulness the robot would use, because humans don’t actually want 100% truth. The link between truth and humor is fascinating, and hard problem to solve in AI. I really liked the way they subdivided their rectangular structure as needed (to run or to pick up things). They were built to help people out. That’s a good thing.

Reeyan Lee

Reeyan Lee, Chief Technical Officer

The robot in the movie Interstellar — It helps humans. It was not designed to replace them. It has humor, and performs reasoning and self-learning, similar to Mind AI. I don’t remember if its intelligence reached to the metatheoretics level, but it looks already over the critical mass.

Isaac Bang

Isaac Bang, Project Lead

I really enjoyed the AI depiction in the movie Ex Machina. The way the AI manipulated the human’s emotions to eventually set itself free was pretty disturbing. It showed that the AI understands human emotion, but probably is unable to actually feel emotion — something that may be true with future AI/AGI in the real world. One lesson from this movie is that educating AI with ethics and morals are critical for an AGI!

Eric Kim

Eric Kim, Director of Finance

In the movie “I, Robot” the robots with AI which are created to serve humans. Things get all crazy when they start making decisions based on the cold pre-programmed without any human side factors like emotion, compassion, or love.

Danver Chandler

Danver Chandler, Director of Community

Hands down, I am a nerd for the Terminator T-800 character. “I’ll be back.”