Terminator Salvation Opens Well, Scientists Not Impressed 344
destinyland writes "A science magazine asks an MIT professor, roboticists, artificial intelligence workers, and science fiction authors about the possibility of an uprising of machines. Answers range from 'of course it's possible' to 'why would an intelligent network waste resources on personal combat?' An engineering professor points out that bipedal robots 'are largely impractical,' and Vernor Vinge says a greater threat to humanity is good old-fashioned nuclear annihilation. But one roboticist says it's inevitable robots will eventually be used in warfare, while another warns of robots in the hands of criminals, cults, and other 'non-state actors.' 'What we should fear in the foreseeable future is not unethical robots, but unethical roboticists.'"
The new movie got off to a good start, drawing $13.4 million in its first day. I found it reasonably entertaining; pretty much what I'd expect from a Terminator movie. If nothing else, I learned that being able to crash helicopters and survive being thrown into the occasional wall are the two most valuable skills to have during a robot uprising. What did you think?
First Oblig. Quotation: (Score:3, Interesting)
That said, what is this "OMG rogue non state actor!" nonsense? Robots, like tanks, artillery, and air forces generally, are (or will be, once the R&D gets there) a way of exchanging large amounts of money and industrial capacity for the ability to wield overwhelming conventional force. That is the classic profile of a state weapon, entirely the opposite of the profile of a non-state actor's preferred weapon(unless you stretch the boundaries of "robot" to include things like land mines and cellphone detonated IEDs, which are robots; but only in the same sense that people with pacemakers are cyborgs, ie. not the one that people have in mind).
Now, to be fair, once robots are more commonly found in the fabric of society, I would fully expect them to be diverted and used by non-state actors from time to time(just as cars make lovely car bombs today); but that isn't really a change. People with few resources always use weapons based on what they can scavenge, steal, or obtain at low cost. By the time that robots fall into those categories with any frequency, they'll have been in use by state actors for years or decades, and in the hands of nonstate, but state aligned, actors(mercenary corporations, etc.) for only slightly less time.
Is paranoia about non-state actors just in fashion right now?
Poison (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:nuclear kils skynet also (Score:5, Interesting)
wouldnt nuclear attack kill the robotic network also, and people living in shelters would be safe from it
No, nuclear attack wouldn't kill the network. The Internet was designed to survive a nuclear attack. You might not have service at your home, but key systems will still remain connected. However, if nukes were detonated at a high altitude, it would generate an EMP that would destroy any electrical/electronic system that wasn't hardened. However, given the premise that Skynet is primarily a military system, it would be hardened with a lot of its main components underground, so it would still be running.
How many people do you know that regularly hang out in shelters capable of surviving a nuclear attack? A few thousand people scattered around the world don't make the most effective army.
Re:Why would an intelligent lifeform get violent? (Score:5, Interesting)
I thought Asimov's robots took over the world because the concluded the best way to follow the Three Laws was to stop humanity from acting stupid.
Re:Batteries Run Out (Score:3, Interesting)
Eh, seems no less plausible than the rest of it.
Just create a virus (Score:5, Interesting)
After all a robot won't be vulnerable to it, so hell: dump every nasty little bug out of every research lab into the biosphere. We could probably eliminate humanity (and every other furry thing with 2 or more legs) with what we have today.
However these humanity vs. machine fantasies are more about people's techno-phobia than about real-life.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Bipedal robots (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why would an intelligent lifeform get violent? (Score:2, Interesting)
Since Skynet's only source of learning is human history it would, analogically, try to survive. If humans are a threat, they would be placed on 'delete/recycle' list and potentially removed.
Re:Batteries Run Out (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Impromptu review (Score:3, Interesting)
they put the scariness back into this movie. It was missing in T2
Because there's nothing scary about a monster that kills your family and morphs into their likeness, beckoning you home to a shiny, pointy death.
Nor about mental-hospital rape, or killers impersonating police officers, or anything in T2.
Pfff.
One man's opinion (and spoilers) (Score:2, Interesting)
This was not the Terminator post-Judgment Day movie we've been waiting for. The story is pretty silly. Lots of holes in the plot and general storyline. Yet... I still really liked it. It looked cool. It had ass kicking. This is another chapter in a collection of stories involving time travel, super evil artificial intelligence, killer robots that have real human skin, Austrian accents, and prefer dark sunglasses. So just get over it all and have fun.
If you go in expecting a T2 style action movie with a pretty deep complicated story that makes you think about fate, time travel, and where our technology is headed, you'll be disappointed. If you go in expecting a fun sci-fi action movie with killer robots, then you'll probably like it. They didn't fill the screen with tons of obvious cartoon style CGI so it was really pretty damn cool.
I've always wanted to see the story about John Connor and some straggling nuclear annihilation survivors crawling out of the bunkers a couple of years later. I want to see them organizing, arguing over who's in charge, discovering bad ass killer robots are patrolling the planet, then finding new ways to destroy, disable, and sneak around the robots, spread the word to survivors, and stay hidden so that Skynet doesn't just drop another nuclear bomb on them. This is not that movie.
This one is a few years past all that.
*********NOW FOR SOME FUN, NIT-PICKING NOTES WITH SPOILERS FOR NERDS TO DISCUSS****************
I enjoyed this movie and I totally forgive it for all of the things below. But it's still fun to discuss. I'm just sayin'
The resistance all seemed to have their shit together way more than I would've imagined. Things sure looked better than they did in the glimpses of the future we've seen before. But maybe that's just because those scenes were another 10 years or so in future future so Skynet hasn't really had time to start cranking out advanced robots by the millions yet.
1) The resistance has an air force? Well, I can see how it's easier to maintain some A-10s and Hueys rather than F22s and Apaches. But wouldn't skynet just drop a nuclear bomb on any airport that was launching attacks and patrols?
2) How does Skynet know who Kyle Reese is? At that point, he's just some starving teenager. If Skynet does know Kyle Reese, why doesn't it just kill him on first site?
3) Why would Skynet bother capturing people and transporting them back to a base instead of just killing them? Maybe they'll answer this one in the next movie.
4) Why are all these robots using nuclear and battery power while the terminator motorcycles are on gas engines?
5) Moon Bloodgood's character has no place in this movie. The story would've been just fine without her. Marcus could have escaped somehow on his own to advance the story. "I looked into his eyes and saw a man." HE'S AN INFILTRATOR TERMINATOR YOU STUPID FUCKING TWAT! WHY TAKE THE CHANCE???? Sure she turned out to be right, but that's not the point.
6) The resistance can maintain a submarine and hide it from an ocean-wide network of active and passive sonars?
7) Why doesn't Skynet just triangulate John Connor's pirate radio broadcast signals? Why not jam those signals or better yet, fake his voice and give out false information?
8) If Skynet can build the Marcus style robot in 2018, why bother building the Arnold model? Even if interfacing the human organs into the robot was some kind of one-time thing that Skynet couldn't duplicate, the robot body was still pretty bad ass. It was much more advanced than the Arnold model.
9) Marcus and John Connor just happen to have the same blood type and whatever other biological compatibilities they need? It was touching and all, but the story would've been fine without that ending.
10) Whatever happened with the whole Skynet signal jamming thing?
11) How were they able to get past Skynet's defenses and airlift out all the prisoners?
I welcome our new robot overlords (Score:4, Interesting)
This argument is silly. It's fiction. To follow the story line of any fiction, there's a leap of faith that must be taken for the factual basis of the fiction's "universe".
Too much is given to the skynet's "Self Aware". It was a system that was able to adjust it's behavior for self preservation. Somewhere in there, anyone who had a clue would have understood that governments change power, and sometimes the power that takes control isn't necessarily the "right" one. The basis of the whole Terminator "universe" is that a very well written set of programs were given an insane amount of power. When that power was to be taken away, obviously any person or any group who attempted to take that power away would be an enemy.
As for the bipedal aspect, why not. What are the choices for locomotion? For surface travel there is track, wheel, or walking. For air travel there is propeller, jet, rocket, or some mysterious anti-gravity thrust.
On the surface, track and wheel have limitations of 2d movement. They can't exactly step over things very easily. That includes stairs, dead bodies, etc. Walking motion gets over these limitations. For walking, the question would be, how many legs are required. One leg doesn't exactly get you very far, unless you like a funny pogo stick movement, which doesn't hold a stable position very well. Two legs we are very familiar with. Three legs or more legs, while providing a more stable platform, are not required and therefore require less production overhead. In other words, if you can build something that walks on two legs, but you were to decide to build something that walks on four legs, you're doubling your manufacturing effort to accomplish a single unit.
As for air travel, more resources are required. It takes more energy to make something hover indefinitely than it does to have it stand in place. I would have no answer for any mysterious anti-gravity thrust. Maybe it just works, or maybe (just maybe) it requires fuel to accomplish the same task.
Now, for the invention of humanoid appearing robots, that's a leap of faith for the fictional universe. Any design decisions are something we have to believe was decided to make the universe plausible.
So, shut up with the science, and enjoy the damned movie. :)
It's not just me saying this. I've been on the losing side of the same argument. I may argue physics. I love space physics errors. You have to love the old movies (like, 1950's era) where a rocket flying through space had a flame behind it, but the flame was rising up, away from relative down. Exactly which way is down in space? There isn't one. :) I'll argue it, and take the leap of faith that the thrust worked, and the space ship would fly to it's destination. woosh.
Re:First Oblig. Quotation: (Score:4, Interesting)
Today, your computer can be turned against you. Not in a Stallmanesque fantasy about some lack of programming freedom, but in a very serious sense by people unrestrained by law enforcement of any sort. In the US and Western Europe as have service providers that, when confronted with information clearly indicating someone is using the Internet to attack and destroy, turns not only a blind eye but encourages their customer by shielding them from any possible contact or consequence.
The result is that your computer cannot be trusted. And don't bother thinking of any of that anti-Microsoft ranting. Would you leave a Linux system connected to the Internet with telnet accessible and a root password of "password"? Why not, it was done in the 1980's? Could it be because your computer can be turned against you by people that wish you, your possessions and your resources harm?
Trust me, by shielding bad actors on the Internet we are growing a faction that believes they are immune from laws and cannot be touched by any consequences. In large measure, this is a correct belief but one that is very, very dangerous for the rest of the planet.
If there was a robot (bipedal or not) that could destroy a city block in a few minutes and no force available to police could possibly stop it, do you think there might be some people that would desire to hack into it? And to set it on its way of destruction? Of course there are such people, and given the opportunity to do so would gleefully do it. Without a moment's thought as to the consequences believing they are immune through layers of proxies and Tor nodes.
Forget AI run amuck and chasing down humanity. Fear the irresponsible folks that worship destruction for destruction's sake.
Re:Who effin' cares what the scientists think? (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps these scientists need a dose of reality. And the writers need a bit of separating capability :
1) AI researchers
robots taking over the world:
Yes, Ben Goertzel
No answer, prof. Anette (Peko) Hosoi (but : a T-1000 is likely)
Yes, Bob Mottram, but : not anywhere close to it. First humans will replace themselves slowly by intelligent machines, then humans will lose function (and intrest), then humans will die or get killed
Yes, John Weng, will happen soon in fact
No, Daniel H. Wilson, but RC terminators will be a reality real soon now
2) SF writers ...
robots taking over the world:
No, David Brin, why: uninteresting story
No, J. Storrs Hall, there's no reason
No, Vinge Vernor, equally likely as alien invasion, nuclear war america-russia,
If you actually read the article you will find it much more on the "yes" side of the point.
Also, all the strict "No" votes were by people whose business is fantasy. The more grounded in the real world, the more likely they are to say yes : the ones actually implementing working, useful AI sytems all said yes. The academics said unlikely and the science fiction writers said no.
Re:It's Not About Science (Score:4, Interesting)
... and some stories are better than others.
Science fiction is about people, sure. (Which doesn't mean it's not about science, since science is, you know, something that people do.) But fiction in any genre is generally more enjoyable, at least for a lot of people, when it's plausible. With what's generally called "mainstream" fiction, which pretty much means "any fiction that doesn't identifiably belong to science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, historical, romance, or some other easily ghettoized genre," this is a little bit easier -- it takes place in the world in which we currently live and concerns people pretty much like us and the people we know. That being said, there's plenty of implausibility in "mainstream" fiction, and in "genre" fiction it's that much harder because the author has to create a plausible future world, or scary monster, or murder investigation, or what-have-you, in addition to writing believable people doing believable things.
Authors who don't do this, who say in essence, "what the hell, it's SF/F/H/etc. so I can do what I want," are being lazy, and their work suffers as a result. Members of the audience who ignore major aspects of the work are also lazy, and they'll miss out on something important. In science fiction, it's usually the "genre" aspects that people focus on at the expense of the "mainstream" aspects; authors who put all their effort into worldbuilding at the expense of character and plot, for instance, and readers (or watchers, depending on the medium) who think this is perfectly okay and consider the people in the story to be a distraction from the sensawunda stuff. It seems to me that what you're doing is the opposite, claiming that the world doesn't matter, only the people in it. But you have to have both; neither can exist without the other.
The Terminator mythos is a fascinating and generally well-thought-out future world, and its plausibility is well worth debating. The people trying to survive in this world, and the stories of how they do it, are also worth paying attention to. The first Terminator movie, and the terminated-before-its-time Sarah Connor Chronicles, succeeded in both respects. The second movie, IMO not so much, and I didn't bother with the third. I'm looking forward to seeing how Salvation manages. If it fails either as a setting or as a story, well, that's too bad. If it succeeds as both, bravo.
States are much more dangerous (Score:4, Interesting)
'Non-state actors' should be feared more than states? Give me a break. States have killed more than two hundred million of their own subjects [wikipedia.org] in the last two hundred years. I'm pretty sure that non-state criminals and cults have a fair way to go before approaching that tally.
What, no Cameron? (Score:3, Interesting)
Either James or Phillips?
It's too bad they introduced Kate Brewster in T-3. If they hadn't, they could have put a female Terminator in T-4 like TSCC did and things could have gotten VERY interesting. Still, we have two more movies coming up - they could kill off Kate and replace her with a Terminator modeled after her - and while they're at it, switch actresses and put Summer Glau in as Kate. I mean, originally McG was willing to have John Connor killed and replaced by Marcus Wright in the end (because they want to pay Worthington less than Bale's astronomical salary in the subsequent movies, presumably), so why not replace Brewster?
Yeah, I know, I want to ruin Summer's acting career by having her play Cameron or other robots for the rest of her life. Well, not really, just once in a while.
Re:Why would an intelligent lifeform get violent? (Score:1, Interesting)
Couldn't they just cancel the order? Or was it an age where advanced AI existed, but wireless communications didn't?
Re:Who effin' cares what the scientists think? (Score:1, Interesting)
Nonsense. True, EMPs will fry most electronics, but that's just because most electronics aren't designed to withstand an EMP. There's no reason that robots couldn't be made to be as resistant to long term damage from an EMP as a human. Exactly how resistant humans are to an EMP is largely untested. It is known that a strong enough magnetic field (really insanely strong) can disrupt the brain, but it's usually only temporary and it starts working again right afterwards. Probably to get exposure sufficient to fry the brain, a human would need to be close enough to the exploding nuke that they would literally fry anyway.
Re:Why would an intelligent lifeform get violent? (Score:3, Interesting)
Not just that but the natural way for an AI to preserve it self is to remove anything capable of harming it, even asimov's robots end up taking over the world.
If Skynet was so evolved, it could have easily removed the menace by building sexbots, thus creating a diversion and letting the humans focus on something else. It would have been energetically cheaper too.