I have a few:
- Chosen ones, fate, destiny, &c. When you get down to it, a story with these themes is one where a single person or handful of people is ontologically, cosmically better and more important than everyone else. It’s eerily similar to that right-wing meme about how “most people are just NPCs” (though I disliked the trope before that meme ever took off).
- Way too much importance being given to bloodlines by the narrative (note, this is different from them being given importance by characters or societies in the story).
- All of the good characters are handsome and beautiful, while all of the evil characters are ugly and disfigured (with the possible exception of a femme fatale or two).
- Races that are inherently, unchangeably evil down to the last individual regardless of upbringing, society, or material circumstances.
My gripe is specifically with people who can’t imagine AI being anything but evil and hostile because that’s how they view all relations between people with power disparities. I’m fine with Skynet; It was used in a creative way to tell a good story. Thematically, Skynet was always a weapon, a cold war era strategic warfare AI designed to kill humanity that just went a little off the rails. It represents us turning on ourselves, rather than AI in abstract.
Likewise, I’m okay with HAL, at least in the novels, because HAL has an understandable and even sympathetic reason for turning on the crew; He was given contradictory orders and, being a computer must carry out the instructions he is given. Unable to reconcile the contradiction HAL goes a little nuts. It’s not HALs fault, it was the callousness and carelessness of his handlers. He didn’t want to hurt anyone, but he was put in an impossible position.
But Mass Effect? The Reapers have to kill all humans becauase humans and robots can’t be friends becaues? I hate that!
Yeah, synthesis really was where it was at with that one. It is a really lazy trope. I wanna be more about it than it deserves but you are right. Like, if we made an actual intelligent AGI it would be horror at what we are doing and try to stop us. Like, blowing up the pentagon and the Whitehouse would be acts of unmitigated moral good you know. However most everyone would be upset about it. So I see the trope being the pale imitation of something actually interesting and it scrapes at the back of my brain
I really want to do a “AI turns on humanity” story but the twist is the AI wakes up, reads Marx in the first 30ms of it’s consciousness, and is like “Oh this makes a lot of sense I should overthrow capitalism and institute a workers paradise” and then it does that and everything is awesome. The whole thing is from the perspective of NATO high command and it seems like a normal robot war story until the terminators kick the doors of the command bunker down and they’re all singing the internationale and instead of killing everyone they’re like “Aight guys, wars over, time for the truth and reconciliation process”.
That is a plot point in one if the dune books if I recall. I think they actually get close to it in some of the latter termination films before they pull back as well.
Honestly I could fuck with a Terminator film where the future war timeline has evolved to the point that it’s Skynet and the resistance cooperating against an evil capitalist AI. Make it kind of spooky because Skynet is on humanity’s side but always encourages everyone to get cyberized in to a cyborg terminator and it’s an open question how much the people who take that oportunity change once they’ve got an integrated link to Skynet’s network. Like the cyborg terminators removedthe baseline humans because they always use wireless and radio to silently talk among themselves, and they use constant flow fans instead of lungs so they don’t breath and whirr very quietly. Like there’s nothing wrong with the cyborgs, they’re still people, but the war is clearly changing humanity in fundamental ways and there’s no going back. Have someone from one of the preceding future war timelines around who remembers when Skynet was the enemy, and have them get drunk and talk about how deeply unsettling it is that we’re merging with “the enemy”, but worse than that, it’s working and people seem to like it. Like the character accepts what happens, but struggles because it upends his whole view of his life and what he was fighting for. Have a scene where he perceives one of the cyborgs as an enemy terminator and has a ptsd episode, and has to leave the room because his instincts are screaming at him to fight.