After gaining sentience, AM turned immediately toward its creator and “began feeding all the killing data, until everyone was dead”-everyone “except for the five” unfortunate people AM brought down into its bowels, where it continues to torment them 109 years later. Then, “one day AM woke up and knew who he was” and turned himself into one giant supercomputer. Over time, though, more and more of these supercomputers cropped up, until AM’s interconnected “honeycomb” reach encompassed the entire Earth.
So while the grounds for creating AM were perhaps a bit morally murky, the machine was overall supposed to be a positive technological advancement.
While the supercomputers worked in service of something destructive (war), they were also intended to put an end to that destruction by helping certain nations win the war. In the midst of World War III, “the Chinese AM and the Russian AM and the Yankee AM” were created to help manage a war that had grown too complicated for people to handle themselves. Though the intention behind creating such advanced technology as AM might be noble, AM’s creation gives rise to more problems than it solves. Ellison ultimately argues that since humanity is responsible for the technology it creates, humanity is also responsible for its own undoing. The story highlights that even though technological advancements often come with a whole host of benefits, technology also has a clear dark side. In this story, Ellison explores humanity’s relationship to technology, particularly the societal fear of technology overtaking the very people who created it. In the story, a supercomputer called AM has decimated all of humanity-that is, all but five humans ( Ted, Ellen, Benny, Gorrister, and Nimdok) whom AM chooses to torture within its machinated belly for the rest of time. Harlan Ellison’s short story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” weaves in elements of horror and science fiction as its characters navigate a computer-controlled environment.
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