I watched a friend’s copy of Eagle Eye last night and I realized that, even though they would deny it, Hollywood actually believes in the doctrine of original sin, at least for machines. (Spoiler Alert: I’m about to give away the premise of the movie) For those of you who may not have seen this movie it revolves around the actions of an artificial intelligence computer which is used by the US military to search through everyone’s online records, like credit cards and driving records, to find signs of terrorist activities. (Interestingly, there actually was such an initiative at the Pentagon called "Total Information Awareness" to data mine public records looking for threats)When the computer’s advice is ignored once too often the machine undertakes a plan to kill the President and his cabinet, drafting Michelle Monaghan and Shia LaBeouf to do the deed against their wills. It came to mind that whenever a computer in the movie becomes capable of independent thought (develops a personality, becomes self-aware how ever you want to describe the process of becoming alive) they usually are evil. The big exception was Johnny 5 from the Short Circuit movies but overall thinking computers are usually not non-violent, altruistic Mother Theresa types in the media. This idea that intelligent beings are naturally malevolent fits nicely with the Christian belief in original sin. Perhaps just having an individual will makes us bent to evil. From 2001 to the Terminator series to the remake of the Battlestar Galactica TV show when machines are able to think for themselves they start doing bad things. As a programmer interested in artificial intelligence I wonder if this is true and what my responsibility is when developing systems employing AI?