First AI to not follow a command?

Question

Which is the first science fiction work to feature an AI that refused to follow commands (not necessary that it takes over the world)". The answer could feature any AI that simply refused to follow a command stating some reason or the other the command being from opening a pod bay door to killing a human being.

Answer 1

The concept of rebellious AI evolved in lockstep with the concept of AI itself. Once an artificial intelligence has been conceived the logical next step is that it will follow its own desires and act in its own interests.

Frankenstein (1818) is arguably the first real example, although the Creature is a biological rather than mechanical artificial intelligence. He's not what we think of as AI today but he is both artificial and intelligent, and like later AIs a product of scientific speculation. Unlike the lumbering monster of film he is highly eloquent:

“By degrees I made a discovery of still greater moment. I found that these people possessed a method of communicating their experience and feelings to one another by articulate sounds. I perceived that the words they spoke sometimes produced pleasure or pain, smiles or sadness, in the minds and countenances of the hearers. This was indeed a godlike science, and I ardently desired to become acquainted with it.”

From the wikipedia summary:

The Creature was enraged by the way he was treated and gave up hope of ever being accepted by humans. Although he hated his creator for abandoning him, he decided to travel to Geneva to find him because he believed that Victor was the only person with a responsibility to help him. On the journey, he rescued a child who had fallen into a river, but her father, believing that the Creature intended to harm them, shot him in the shoulder. The Creature then swore revenge against all humans. He travelled to Geneva using details from Victor's journal, murdered William, and framed Justine for the crime.

The Creature demands that Victor create a female companion like himself. He argues that as a living being, he has a right to happiness. The Creature promises that he and his mate will vanish into the South American wilderness, never to reappear, if Victor grants his request. Should Victor refuse, the Creature threatens to kill Victor's remaining friends and loved ones and not stop until he completely ruins him. Fearing for his family, Victor reluctantly agrees. The Creature says he will watch over Victor's progress.

The concept of a mechanical AI comes a little later. Samuel Butler wrote the essay 'Darwin Among the Machines' in 1863.

We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race.

Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.

War to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of the race.

He incorporated this idea in his novel Erewhon, written in 1872, a satire on Victorian life. In this world's history a scientist presented the idea that machines have feelings, resulting in all machines being scrapped. Butler anticipates the Terminator franchise and jumps straight to the end of Terminator 2, removing the threat of AI at an embryonic stage. Technically, this doesn't answer the question as the machines never get an actual chance to rebel. (The Butlerian Jihad in the Dune Universe, the crusade against the thinking machines, is named after Samuel Butler).

Moxon's Master (1899), a short story by Ambrose Bierce, is an early example of an AI directly rebelling. A chess-playing automaton kills its human opponent after losing.