[Astromancer]

AIs with Deadmen's Missions

In some ways, this is the idea of the Bureaucratic Snafu simply getting outrageously worse. This Urban Legend does have elements of a ghost story but highly rationalized.

The basic premise is that certain AIs were given assignments by now dead bureaucrats. These assignments may have once been logical or useful but now they are long out of date and a problem. However, since the AIs in question lack free will to change their missions and those whose authority they recognize are long dead, these AIs keep trying to do their jobs. This can have consequences from silly to fatal.

One horror film has used the idea of a broken AI as the monster. However, this meme is mainly a "the gunment can't do anything right" example. There are examples of people trying to cover up murders by making it look like a broken AI did it. If anybody got away with doing that sort of thing, how would you know?