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Films

Avengers: Age of Ultron

Raffaele Alberto Ventura views a self-portrait of industrial society.

Tony Stark really screwed it up this time. His basic idea seemed good enough: build a computerised system – Ultron – to protect the Earth from the threats with which the Marvel Universe is usually packed: aggressive alien races, mad gods, devourers of worlds. Then disaster struck: the system began to evolve. It became self-conscious, no longer willing to obey its creator, and revolted.

If he had but seen them, the movies Terminator (1984) and Matrix (1999) might have warned Stark that creating an artificial intelligence capable of learning at an exponential rate is not such a brilliant idea.

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