Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis imagines a vertical city of gleaming towers where the wealthy live in comfort above while a vast working class toils unseen beneath. Co-written with Thea von Harbou and set in the then-futuristic year 2026, the film introduces one of early cinema’s first robots: a humanlike machine that embodies early fears about artificial intelligence.
At the center is Maria, a compassionate leader from the workers’ level who speaks for justice. The city’s ruler commissions a scientist to graft Maria’s image onto an android to silence resistance. As the double, the robot manipulates the laboring masses, deepening their exploitation by blurring the line between human and machine. Because workers cannot tell real people from simulacra, the android’s actions fuel chaos and catastrophe — including floodwaters that sweep through the city.
Lang’s Menschmaschine captures technology’s shadow side and anticipated debates that dominate today: which jobs automation will replace, whether entire industries will be disrupted, and how power concentrates when technical expertise serves elite interests. Social media and business commentary now repeatedly speculate about rapid upheaval in office work, caregiving, and many other fields — anxieties that Metropolis dramatizes nearly a century earlier.
The film’s influence echoes across later science fiction. In Terminator, machines turn on humanity; Blade Runner explores engineered workers whose emotions and limits create moral and social crises; in contrast, characters like Star Wars’ C-3PO represent helpful, companionable machines. Today similar tensions appear in proposals for AI caregivers and household assistants as well as in stark warnings that compare unchecked AI risk to nuclear danger.
Some of Lang’s inventions proved prescient: video communication and personal devices that let us see and speak with distant people are now ordinary. Remote meetings, subtle visual cues like cameras-off or joining calls in pajamas, and new workplace norms show how technology reshapes everyday life.
Metropolis refuses simple optimism or fatalism. Its portrait of technological promise entwined with social division and concentrated power still resonates. The future Lang imagined has, in many ways, already arrived — and his warning about who benefits and who pays for progress remains urgent.