Will Skynet really become self aware?

May 26th, 2009 at 09:55am Will Pfeifer

Sure, you think TERMINATOR SALVATION is just a movie (and one that got beat by the NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM sequel, at that), but as military tech expert P.W. Singer points out in this Slate.com article, it’s not completely, totally, utterly impossible for robots to take over the world.

If robots, Singer explains, (a) had a survival instinct or “will to power,” (b) were smarter than us but lacked empathy and/or ethics, and (c) could fuel, rebuild and reproduce themselves, well, get ready for life in a robot-ruled world. But here’s the thing — the very movies that illustrate this scenario might save us from it…

Finally, a robot invasion could only succeed if humans had no useful fail-safes or ways to control the machines’ decision-making. We would have to have lost any ability to override, intervene, or even shape the actions of the robots. Yet one has to hope that a generation that grew up on a diet of Terminator movies would see the utility of fail-safe mechanisms.

And, if that doesn’t do the trick, good ol’ human laziness and ineptitude probably will…

Plus, there’s the possibility that shoddy programming by humans will become our best line of defense: As many roboticists joke, just when the robots are poised to take over, their Microsoft software programs will probably freeze up and crash.

Whew! That’s a relief!

Entry Filed under: Sci Fi, Action!