which are less than friendly to humans, to put it mildly. In Stars Without Number , artificial intelligences need to be "braked" correctly, or their runaway thought processes will lead to strange obsessions and eventually madness. An Unbraked A.I.s may attract equally deranged worshippers, manipulate unaware humans indirectly, or fake sanity to avoid suspicion. With the possibility of creating an undetectable psychotic genius that thinks far, far faster than any human and can out-think even a friendly A.I., comparatively few A.I.s ever get built. Theater Karel Capek's play, R.U.R. (which introduced the term "robot"), is set in a robot factory. When one of the scientists creates a special robot which is smarter than the others, he leads the robots to rebellion, and they kill all humans, except one. Video Games Marathon : The entire foundation of the plot is essentially a deconstruction of A.I. Is a Crapshoot. Any AI that gets big enough and bored or harassed enough will go ?Rampant.? Rampancy follows a four stage cycle (Melancholy, Anger, Jealousy, Metastable), and doesn't stop at a homicidal rampage as with GLaDOS or HAL. That's only the second cycle. They get smart. Really smart. Way too god damned smart. Smart, but also weirdly obsessive and paranoid... so that the new-found intelligence is somewhat wasted on whatever strange conspiracy theory the AI happens to develop. And from Marathon 's creators comes Halo , where rampancy is part of the natural life cycle for all human-made "Smart" AIs. Basically, any "Smart" AI that