The dream of artificial intelligence has been around since the dawn of fiction, stirring fantasy and stoking anxiety about a world populated by sentient machines and mankind’s place in it. But artificial intelligence isn’t always synonymous with artificial wisdom. For every Deep Blue or HAL 9000, there’s a self-aware computer that’s not worth the silicon that was frittered away on its construction—a waste of artificial intelligence that manifests itself in the real world via whatever crazy sex-bot Japan invented today, and in the world of entertainment in examples like the dozen assembled here. All of them take the gleaming, terrifying future promised by AI and squander it on technology that has no real reason to exist.
