Turing's Red Flag

The 19th-century U.K. Locomotive Act, also known as the Red Flag Act, required motorized vehicles to be preceded by a person waving a red flag to signal the oncoming danger. Movies can be a good place to see what the future looks like. According to Robert Wallace, a retired director of the CIA's Office of Technical Service: "... When a new James Bond movie was released, we always got calls asking, 'Do you have one of those?' If I answered'no', the next question was, 'How long will it take you to make it?' Folks didn't care about the laws of physics or that Q was an actor in a fictional series--his character and inventiveness pushed our imagination ..."3 As an example, the CIA successfully copied the shoe-mounted spring-loaded and poison-tipped knife in From Russia With Love. It's interesting to speculate on what else Bond movies may have led to being invented. For this reason, I have been considering what movies predict about the future of artificial intelligence (AI). One theme that emerges in several science fiction movies is that of an AI mistaken for human.