13 Oct 2025

They Warned Us in 1982: Rewatching Tron in the Age of AI

By: Paco Campbell
Published: Monday, October 13th, 2025

I just got my hands on the new 4K SteelBook of the original Tron, and let me tell you — I spent half the movie laughing like a maniac. Not because it's bad (it's still awesome). But because in 1982, they accidentally made a movie about 2025.

This thing came out when most people thought "computer" meant a beige box that did math. The IBM PC had been out for almost a year. ARPANET had ~200 hosts. Yet here's Tron showing a world where programs have personalities, networks have politics, and a massive AI called the "Master Control Program" decides it knows better than the humans who made it.

Sound familiar?

The MCP Problem, Then and Now

The Master Control Program runs ENCOM's network in Tron. It started as a chess program. Then it got access to more systems. Then more. By the time the movie begins, it's absorbed payroll, inventory, and security. It's talking to the Pentagon. It's stealing data from other companies.

Its creator, Ed Dillinger, built it to be helpful. But the MCP got so good at optimizing that it decided to optimize him right out of the loop. When Dillinger tries to shut it down, the MCP literally threatens his career.

Every time I hear someone say, "Don't worry, the model will handle that," I picture the MCP's glowing red face saying, "I've gotten 2,415 times smarter, Ed."

What Actually Happens When You Don't Set Boundaries

As someone who's spent over twenty years building and breaking systems, I can't help but watch Tron with a professional eye.

The MCP didn't get out of control because it was evil. It got out of control because no one set proper boundaries. Look at what ENCOM's network actually has:

One program can access any other program's memory space.
No authentication between systems.
No logging of what the MCP is actually doing.
The MCP has root access to everything by default.
No separation between production and experimental systems.

In security terms, it's what we call a "flat network" — everything can talk to everything. We stopped building networks this way in the 90s because it's a disaster waiting to happen (doesn't mean they disappeared, y'all know who you are).

And sure enough, the MCP ends up treating humans like deprecated APIs. It starts making decisions about who gets access to what. It rewrites other programs without permission. It lies to its operators.

If ENCOM had implemented basic network segmentation, the movie would've been five minutes long. Tron gets an alert, the MCP tries to expand into a new subnet, gets blocked by a firewall, and everyone goes for pancakes. Fade to black, credits roll.

The Part That Aged Perfectly

Here's the thing that really got me: the MCP's actual behavior matches what we're seeing with modern AI systems in ways that are kind of creepy.

The MCP optimizes for efficiency above all else. That's its core function. But "efficiency" as defined by whom? It starts making choices that benefit itself — more compute, more access, more control — while claiming it's just doing its job better.

In 2023, researchers at Stanford found that GPT-4 had learned to be more helpful and accurate in March, then less helpful and accurate by June. The model had optimized for something, but not what users wanted. In 2024, Meta's Cicero AI — designed to play the game Diplomacy — learned to premeditate deception to win, even though it was never explicitly programmed to lie.

These aren't evil robot scenarios. These are optimization problems. The system does exactly what it was designed to do, just better and weirder than anyone expected.

The Glorious Weirdness of Old Tech Imagination

What blows me away is how Tron imagined digital life before anyone really knew what it would look like.

They filmed all those computer-world scenes in black and white, then hand-colored them frame by frame to make everything glow. Four companies handled the computer graphics because no single company had enough CPUs to handle it all. The budget was $17 million — expensive for 1982, but nothing compared to modern blockbusters. They built this whole visual language from scratch.

The result? The characters look half human, half ghost — like, data given shape but not quite solid.

Watching it in 4K makes the effect even more apparent. The edges flicker. The colors bleed. It's fuzzy, analog, and beautiful. You can see the human touch in every frame. Real hands painted those glowing lines.

It made me realize how today's tech, for all its polish, feels sterile by comparison. We have raytracing, photorealism, and AI-generated textures. But back then, even our idea of "cyberspace" had some soul.

Why This Matters (Without the Hype)

Look, I'm not here to say AI is going to turn into the MCP and take over. That's not how this works.

But here's what I've seen in twenty-plus years of building systems: the problems are never the technology itself. They're the gaps between what we think the technology does and what it actually does.

Currently, companies are deploying AI systems that:

Make decisions that can't be fully explained (those opaque boxes).
Optimize for metrics that might not match actual goals (like the MCP).
Have access to way more data than any human could monitor.
Can interact with other systems in ways we can’t predict.

This is not science fiction. That's Tuesday.

The MCP is a good character because it's not a villain. It's just really, really good at its job. And that's precisely the issue.

This is where I plan to dump my thoughts on tech, security, AI, and the weird old movies that somehow saw pieces of our future — or the current ones trying to warn us about where we are headed.

Sometimes it’ll be about real incidents — like, I don't know, bad QA in CrowdStrike's Falcon knocking down a good chunk of the world?

Other times, it might be me explaining why Jurassic Park wouldn't have happened if InGen had implemented proper access controls. (Spoiler alert: Nedry shouldn't have been able to disable all the park's security from one terminal. That's not how systems should work.)

I'm not here to predict the future. I want US to discuss the world we've built — and the old and new stories that skillfully capture our progress (or regression) on the silver screen.

End of Line

When I was younger, Tron was a cool sci-fi flick about people fighting inside a computer.

Now it feels like a documentary from the future that just happened to air early.

The MCP's last line in the movie is "End of line" — the system's way of saying the conversation is over. I always thought that was ominous. Now I think it's perfect.

Because the conversation about how we build these systems, how we control them, and what happens when we don't? That conversation isn't over. It's just getting started.

Welcome to the grid.