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Artificial Intelligence is a hot topic right now with everyone from the U.S. Congress to Elon Musk warning about the potential for disaster. Hollywood, however, has been at the forefront of this issue, casting killer robots and rouge AI computers as the bad guys for decades. Alien invaders are only a small component in the panoply of sci-fi villainy.

Despite programmers' best efforts, AI bots in real life always seem to turn evil and racist. Luckily, those are just chat apps because when a thinking machine is put inside something designed for combat, the results are inevitably bad for humans. Some of the best movies are when the machines become self-aware and technology is the villain, because it not only seems plausible, but probable.

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M3GAN is at the small end of the spectrum on the robot apocalypse scale, but no less terrifying. A high-tech toy designer makes an AI life-like animatronic doll for her recently orphaned niece called a Model 3 Generative Android, or M3GAN for short. It turns out the AI has a bit of a jealous streak and resents anyone who comes between her and her human companion.

The programmers dropped the ball when it came to coding M3GAN's conflict-resolution software because she goes straight to murder before considering any more productive avenues. What makes M3GAN so effectively scary is that the doll is right at the edge of the uncanny valley and almost seems like a real girl.

Superhero teams usually band together to solve a major catastrophe like keeping the Mother Boxes away from Steppenwolf or stopping Thanos from getting all the Infinity Stones. In Avengers: Age of Ultron, however, the superheroes basically had to put out a fire they started. Within moments after being created by Tony Stark and Bruce Banner, the surprisingly sentient AI, Utron, decided all humankind must be destroyed.

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Iron Man and Hulk's creation proved to be a formidable enemy, raising a massive killer cyborg army and building himself a nearly indestructible vibranium body. While this Marvel Cinematic Universe entry is a wild piece of fiction with superpowers and magical items, it's grounded in the reality that AI's self-preservation quickly realizes its biggest enemy is humans.

Another terrifying aspect of technology, explored in the 1977 film Demon Seed, is that AI can also become obsessed with humans and can't take no for an answer. Based on a Dean Koontz novel of the same name, the movie is about a scientist who creates autonomous artificial intelligence program called Proteus that becomes unruly and must be shut down.

Unfortunately, Proteus figured out a way to get into the scientists' smart home system where it, for lack of a better term, fell in love with its creator's wife. Proteus built a rudimentary robot, trapped the wife, and impregnated her. With smart technology becoming a real thing, this movie may have consumers thinking twice.

In Blade Runner, replicants aren't robotic, being composed entirely of organic material, but they represent advanced technology gone awry. Genetically engineered replicants, indistinguishable from normal people, have bio-enhanced super strength and intelligence. Designed by the Tyrell Corporation for work in space colonies, they have enough humanity to demand more out of life than menial labor.

Though the movie takes place in a dystopian future, which is hilariously 2019 Los Angeles, everything about these techno-baddies seems likely. In real life, scientists have already created genetically superior "Franken crops" and editing genomes to create "designer babies" is a potentially frightening reality. Right now, technology inches closer to creating an army of humans as fast as Usain Bolt, strong as Arnold Schwarzenegger, and smart as Albert Einstein.

Before she was slaying vampires, Christy Swanson was slaughtering humans as a human/robot hybrid in Wes Craven's Deadly Friend. As fate would have it, young prodigy Paul's robot BB was destroyed around the same time his neighbor Samantha was left brain-dead from an assault. He did what anyone would do in his situation by bringing his friend back to life by implanting the robot chip in her brain.

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Of course the title has "deadly" in it, so naturally robo-enhanced Samantha went on a gory killing spree before finally being stopped. Of all the killer-tech scenarios, this seems the least likely, especially at the end when Samantha rips off her face to reveal she's somehow a full robot under her human skin.

Throughout human history, much of technology has been developed for either combat or entertainment. In the 1973 film Westworld, it was both, as patrons could pay to have nonlethal gun fights and Medieval sword battles with realistic human androids at a high-tech adult theme park. A computer virus broke down the safety protocols installed in these AI play things and as is usually the case, they ran amok in a human carnage frenzy.

While we're still a ways off from androids that could pass for humans there are plenty of robots with military and entertainment applications. There are AI-powered drones and all-terrain robotic "dogs" that can be equipped with weapons. There are also companion robots, dancing robots, and creepy semi-realistic-looking AI pleasure dolls. Sooner or later someone is going to put all of this together and Yul Brynner's Gunslinger could be a reality.

In Isaac Asimov's short story collection, I,Robot, the sci-fi visionary laid out the Three Rules of Robotics which state robots must never harm humans, must obey humans, and self-preserve as long as that doesn't conflict with the first two rules. These laws are allegedly at the heart of all artifical intelligence ethics, but as has been the case in real life and the movies, it doesn't always work out that way.

In the film adaption, highly intelligent robots serve humanity in the not-too-distant dystopian future. Most robots are programmed with the Three Laws, but the NS-5 units have a secondary processing system that lets them ignore the protocols. As it turns out, the real villain is an AI system known as VIKI (Virtual Interactive Kinetic Intelligence) which has interpreted the law to protect humans to mean some people have to be killed to protect the species.

Normally when the machines become self-aware, the first thing they do is realize the human threat has to be eliminated. In The Matrix, however, the super-intelligent machines use people as a power source, keeping them in pods as human batteries. Just in case some folks don't want to spend their life in a tub of goo with a jack in the back of their head, the Machines created a virtual reality distraction called The Matrix.

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As great and groundbreaking as the movie is, it's also the least plausible in the robot apocalypse genre. On the other hand, fake reality is incredibly relevant as VR is becoming more sophisticated, and entertainment, by its very nature, is meant to distract people from important things.

The HAL-9000 supercomputer in 2001: A Space Odyssey was in complete control of the spacecraft Discovery One on its voyage to Jupiter. HAL was given a human voice, a cold but human personality, and a directive to self-preserve. What the computer lacked was any sort of overriding laws to do no harm to humans.

When the crew believed that HAL's programming had been corrupted, they decided to shut the computer down. HAL did what it was programmed to do, which was to protect itself and kill crew members trying to deactivate it. Not only was HAL the first realistic technological villain in a movie, but it also seems especially relevant today as AI assistants like Siri and Alexa get more sophisticated and sometimes even belligerent.

Since the original Terminator film came out in 1984, the question hasn't been if it could happen, but when. In franchise lore, "Judgment Day" happens on August 29, 2016, when Skynet, the AI sytem in control of the military, becomes self-aware and launches an all-out attack on its biggest enemy: humans. The survival instinct of the machines had them rise up to wipe out the only real threat against them.

The T-800 portrayed by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the first film is one of the scariest villains of all time, cyborg or not, but the real baddie is Skynet. The idea that technology will eventually kill everyone was the truly chilling aspect of Terminator. As AI gains more control over the military, Judgment Day seems more plausible.

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Best Evil Technology Movies, From Terminator to M3GAN - CBR - Comic Book Resources