There are a few canonical thought experiments in the history of artificial intelligence: Alan Turing’s “Imitation Game” and the late American philosopher John Searle’s “Chinese Room” are two of the more well known. A more obscure one, “Roko’s Basilisk”, was posed in 2010 by an online user with the moniker Roko on a forum for internet rationalists called LessWrong. Roko’s question: in a future with a super-intelligent AI, why would the AI not punish both those who fought against it entering into existence, and also those who knew of its possibility but did nothing to bring it about? The site’s founder declared the experiment an “information hazard”, deleted the post and decreed that discussion of it be banned for five years.
Roko’s Basilisk is one of those ideas that lurks in the stranger corners of the internet. Which is why it was surprising to find a depiction of it on the wall of a Bond villain’s office. The lair had all the familiar elements: a drinks cabinet, a secret panel, a safe. But here, in the hideout of Nicholas Webb, CEO of the defence company Webb Industries, was a painting representing this rationalist’s dilemma. Webb is the antagonist of the newly released James Bond game 007: First Light – and is also, apparently, familiar with LessWrong.
To say there’s some pressure involved in the release of this game is something of an understatement. The most recent film in the Bond franchise came out five years ago, and the next is unlikely to arrive before 2028 – which could make it the longest gap in the series’s history. For any boy growing up today, there is no equivalent of the Bonds played by Roger Moore, Pierce Brosnan or Daniel Craig, since the actor who will play the film character’s next iteration is yet to be announced. This game must bear the load of their fevered imaginations. Unlike previous Bond games, First Light doesn’t transpose an existing Bond from the films, but starts afresh with the 31-year-old actor Patrick Gibson. The persona of the game is 26, half the age of Craig’s Bond in No Time to Die: from Gen X straight to Gen Z, skipping millennials as we go.
Then there’s the cultural weight of Bond. In the geopolitically turbulent world of today, Britain needs its reputation for secretly running the show more than ever. Thanks to the Bond franchise, the game series Call of Duty, and all those other hyper-realistic depictions of British martial and clandestine excellence, we remain clinging to the top table. The first time I played First Light was a few months ago, at a preview event in London. It was the same day the super-mandarin Olly Robbins was being quizzed by the Foreign Affairs Select Committee. Surrounded by high-powered gaming computers with see-through innards and liquid cooling systems, as well as excited games journalists who had flown in from across Europe, it was here – rather than in Westminster’s Boothroyd Room – that the case for Britain was being made.
The Bond, and Britain, of this game feels new. He follows strict rules of engagement. The Aston Martin he drives is a hybrid. His many quips include “Arts funding isn’t what it used to be” – not quite “I thought Christmas only comes once a year”. Alongside the ability to shoot your way out of a situation like Brosnan in his prime, you can also bluff your way out of danger like a hungover undergrad in a first-year tutorial.
We begin off the coast of Iceland. Bond is but a mere naval aircrewman, carrying the bags of a considerably tougher squad of men from the other great institution of British soft-hard power: the SAS. Within 60 seconds it has all gone wrong, and Bond is at the bottom of the Atlantic. My first act as a player is to resurrect him, alongside my own memories of what each button on the controller is meant to do. I guide my wounded charge, along with the rest of the survivors, on to a wind-lashed beach in driving rain. It’s basically The Tempest.
It turns out that on this lonely black sand spit, hell is empty and the devils are here – if by devils we mean vaguely Russian antagonists sending any SAS men they find straight to the Elysian Fields. Then it’s back to MI6, who are riding high: they no longer have to put up with the dorks of Cheltenham, who have been replaced by a world-leading supercomputer in the basement, hosting an AI instance finely tuned to predict any and all national security incidents.
It’s not all Minority Report. “I believe there is still a need for human flourishes such as heart and intuition in spycraft,” says the new M, before inviting me to join the rebooted double-O programme. Then off I go on my Bond Bildungsroman, starting in a Living Daylights-inspired MI6 training camp in Malta. After that, it’s on to a swanky do at the “Works and Arts” museum in Kensington – enjoyably referred to as the W&A – to meet Bond’s new nemesis. He has the looks of a Made in Chelsea cast member, and is just as annoying.
The result of all this is a game with the pacing, craft, and texture of a Bond film – and one impossible to dislike. There’s a certain magnetism to “the spectacle of skill”, as the critic Robert Hughes once put it. Here, deft touches are everywhere. There’s the retro-style Q lab, packed full of gadgets from old films and headed up by a Q with a Terry Thomas-esque cravat and fabulous statement glasses. There is Lennie James, cast as Bond’s mentor John Greenaway, who appears to have wandered in from the RSC by mistake. And there’s the sheer Roger Moore-ness of the game. A trip to a luxury Thai resort involves not only a tactical shootout in white tie, but also a reworked version of the finale to The Spy Who Loved Me (“Keeping the British end up, sir!”) involving some camera-equipped glasses. Later, as I commandeered a dump truck and the theme song from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service started playing, the ancestral urge could not be contained any longer. I was practically vibrating.
This is a love letter to Britain. “Bellend”, “cheeky half” and “telly” all get an airing. Bond is told to get in the Land Rover – not the SUV. The essential tool to close a deal with a bad guy played by Lenny Kravitz? Season tickets at Old Trafford’s Stretford End. In one lovingly crafted scene, a drive through central London, the roads are 90 per cent roadworks.
At times it feels more like playing a John Wyndham novel, or an episode of Quatermass, than a spy game. In the first mission, Bond is tasked with rescuing government scientists from a dimly lit geodesic dome; a later one is set in a secret corporate lab in the mountains of the British Antarctic Territory. If you define science-fiction, as JG Ballard did, as the body’s desire to become a machine, spy fiction is surely about the body’s desire to avoid such a fate. Often it’s the battle against a literal technology, with sci-fi itself often the villain: Harry Palmer in the The Ipcress File, strapped to a chair, battling against his very own brainwashing, grinding his wrists into the leather until the skin breaks. Sometimes it’s not the machine, but the temptation to think like one, that needs to be defeated; the heroes of John le Carré, pitted against an invisible, systemic machinery of thought, the grinder into which the jaded bureaucrats chuck in the less jaded for sport; or, more recently, Jackson Lamb and his merry band of Slow Horses misfits, in their eternal battle with the dead-eyed drones of Regent’s Park.
When we think of Bond, it’s normally the fight to fend off literal machinery: Hugo Drax’s lunar base in Moonraker, the malevolent microchips of Max Zorin in A View to a Kill, even the laser pointed at Connery’s groin in Goldfinger. But that broader battle against machine thought, the idea that we can smooth out the lies, fallacies and failures of the human mind, and in doing so create something better – the dream of the LessWrong faithful – has a rich tradition in the Bond franchise. In Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, Mathis, one of Bond’s allies, tauntingly says: “Don’t let me down and become human yourself. We would lose such a wonderful machine.”
First Light, like the best Bonds, manages to ride both horses at once, but the fact that Roko’s Basilisk makes it into the villain’s lair makes it plain: this is James Bond against the clankers. When asked to decide between technological perfection or the messy, imperfect institution of His Majesty’s Secret Service, we know who he’s going to choose. The same goes for when we meet Webb Industries’ new line of robots: the “Tabula Rasa” model. As soon as we hear the name, we know they’re not far off from being turned to scrap by MI6’s greatest agent. By the time we meet our last villain for the final-boss battle, he has literally been made into a machine for Bond to defeat.
Yet this isn’t a simple Luddite morality tale. If so, why the lovingly rendered Q lab, or the obsession with gadgets throughout? Nor is the AI ever really at fault: this is not the omniscient “Entity” of the final two Mission: Impossible films, but something much more fallible. Indeed, it is humanity’s flaws accidentally encoded into the machine that is the plot’s real engine.
Webb’s tragedy is that he is no ordinary Bond villain, but someone torn by his obligations: to his wife, to his son, to his country and to the future. His first encounter with Bond ends on a revealing note: “People really are capable of the most extraordinary things. I spend so much time around machines, I sometimes forget.” The battle within him, between the romantic and the rationalist, is the game’s conflict personified.
It is this British sensibility that First Light is exporting: the distrust of grand schemes, the defence of imperfect institutions against abstract first principles, the virtue in muddling through. As the game’s art director, Rasmus Poulsen, has put it: “The thematics of Bond are often ‘beware of utopia’.” This is not the philosopher-spy of the Craig films with Bond girls named for Proust and tête-à-têtes in front of a Turner. This Bond has to be taught how to tie a bow tie, keeps touching his earpiece at inappropriate moments (“Stop touching your bloody ear”) and is genuinely annoying at times. But he is Bond nonetheless. According to the Bond historian Mark Edlitz, during the gap between Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton a script not unlike this one was written and shelved. The franchise producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli killed the project, arguing that what drew people to Bond is the dream of a man at “the height of his powers”. The response so far to First Light, with more than 1.5 million copies sold in the first 24 hours of its release, indicates this may have been a rare duff call from Cubby.
The best scene in the game happens not at the end, but about two thirds of the way through. At long last he’s softened up Lennie James. His reward is a final piece of advice about the new world being born before him: “Don’t let it change you.” Is this a plea to Bond, or us? The internet-forum obsessives of the early 2010s now run the show. They, like Webb, are on top.
Is this then the next incarnation of Britain’s knack for telling stories? Not stringing out late-empire tales for as long as possible; not selling a dream of Aston Martins, tuxedos and peak male desirability. Instead: beware of utopia. Either way, we know one thing. James Bond will be back to make the argument again. As the game finishes, we get our gun-barrel moment, our resurrection, and a reminder. He will return.
[Further reading: Steven Spielberg goes home]
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This article appears in the 10 Jun 2026 issue of the New Statesman, How Britain lost control