AI computers

Bringing everything back to "2001: A Space Odyssey," we have HAL 9000, the iconic artificial intelligence robot that makes up one of the main characters in the sci-fi film. That character was represented in the film as an all-seeing red light from within a wall-mounted control panel that sports a creepily soothing voice.

Nowadays we have IBM's Watson, the namesake of IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, which competed in an episode of "Jeopardy" earlier this year. Tied to a room of hardware below the stage, Watson answered questions against two human opponents on the popular game show and ended up winning.

And before Watson there was its predecessor, also made by IBM, dubbed Deep Blue, an AI that was programmed to annihilate humans--at chess that is. In 1997 the machine won against world champion Garry Kasparov, who had beaten the machine just the year before. After Kasparov accused IBM of cheating, Deep Blue was retired.