SHODAN – System Shock
Empathy is a foreign word to pretty much everyone on this list, but among them, the Sentient Hyper-Optimized Data Access Network — better known as SHODAN — may be the worst.
Being a rogue AI, SHODAN has all the emotions one might expect to see displayed by a computer program. This alone would make her a prime candidate for the growing list of things that might cause the extinction of the human race. To guarantee a spot near the top of that list, all a purely hypothetical hacker would need to do is remove that morality garbage from her programming and keep her online long enough to develop an impressive god complex.
This is what happens in the first System Shock. In the sequel, SHODAN pulls the ultimate prank on the would-be hero in what may very well be one of gaming’s finest twists.