The Terminator Isn’t Real, But It Will Be Soon. Get Ready.
By: Tim Ventura
Tags: Futurism, Terminator, Robotics, Military, Technology

The Terminator Isn’t Real, But It Will Be Soon. Get Ready.

All the pieces for Judgement Day are in place. It only needs the malevolent spark of machine intelligence to set it off.

James Cameron’s “The Terminator” was a cinematic retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for the post-industrial era. Gone was the stitched-together, emotionally conflicted monster of the original novel: Cameron forged it a new body out of hyperalloy, and gave us an unstoppable, flesh-over-metal killing machine designed for a singular purpose: human genocide.

The Terminator was scary, but it was supposed to be. It was a cautionary tale about the dangers of hubris, painting a bleak picture of a post-apocalyptic future where the scattered, starving remnants of mankind hide amidst the smoking rubble to avoid extermination by the machines.

His message wasn’t subtle: Cameron warned us of the dangers of AI long before Elon Musk spoke on it — but despite his cautions (or perhaps inspired by them), the military & key robotics companies are actively working to build precisely the types of doomsday machines portrayed in the movie.

Rise Of The Machines

It’s been over 35 years since The Terminator was released, and rather than a global moratorium on weaponized robots, we’re instead seeing an explosion of research into autonomous tanks, aircraft, humanoid robots, and AI software systems to pull the trigger.

There’s a grim irony in the fact that a cautionary tale about autonomous killing machines has turned into an arms race to see who can develop them first —and it’s even more ironic that the organizations developing these technologies reference the movie when describing their projects:

F.E.D.O.R. — with a gun, but “not a Terminator”.

FEDOR

In a recent tweet, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin described the “Robot platform F.E.D.O.R. showing shooting skills with two hands,” and quickly added, “we are not creating a Terminator, but artificial intelligence that will be of great practical significance in various fields.”

Ostensibly, F.E.D.O.R. has been developed for rescue missions, and the prototype was even sent to the International Space Station to conduct repairs, but as The Independent has written, “military uses have also been suggested by engineers.”

Boston Dyamics Atlas robot shown doing Parkour

Atlas

Despite internet confusion from a viral hoax video by “BossTown Dynamics”, the real Atlas robot developed by Boston Dynamics has never fired a gun — but it can run, do backflips, and parkour. Developed under grants by DARPA, this robot is also designed for disaster response, but that didn’t stop ExtremeTech for describing it as a “Real World Terminator”, saying:

At 6’2″ and 330lbs, Atlas is incredibly imposing…while Atlas is initially conceived as a disaster response robot, such as cleaning up and looking for survivors after a Fukushima-like disaster, it’s easy to imagine Atlas being the basis of a robotic army.

The Milrem TheMIS Hybrid Unmanned Ground Vehicle

TheMIS

Futurism.com described this robotic tank as being “straight out of the Terminator”, and cited a C4ISRNET article indicating that it was equipped with a 12.7mm machine gun & 40mm automatic grenade launcher in a recent demonstration.

Likened to the T-1 robot tank in Terminator 3, the Milrem TheMIS is one of many robotic tanks currently under development, including the Ripsaw M5 Robo-Tank, Miloš UGV, Gladiator TUGV, Foster-Miller TALON, and many more — all heavily armed, and currently all requiring a human operator to pilot them remotely.

The Predator Drone

The General Atomics MQ-1 Predator drone was designed in the ‘90s for reconnaissance, but within a decade the Air Force had armed it for drone strikes, and created the MQ-9 Reaper as a successor — which the USAF Chief of Staff called “a true hunter-killer.”

The Guardian reports that Britain is funding research into drones that decide who they kill, and of the 36 countries currently using armed drones, analyst Paul Scharre says it’s “very likely that nations will invest in autonomous technology, if nothing else out of fear that their adversaries are doing so.”

Google backed out of drone research because of the ethical implications, but it hasn’t stopped military organizations from pursuing autonomous killing machines, which have the advantage of “freeing current pilots from the moral responsibility of casualties”.

SkyNet

The Terminator franchise wouldn’t be complete without the series arch-villain. As it turns out, SkyNet is already here, and according to Ars Technica, it’s already killed “thousands of people”:

“SkyNet engages in mass surveillance of Pakistan’s mobile phone network, and then uses a machine learning algorithm on the cellular network metadata of 55 million people to try and rate each person’s likelihood of being a terrorist.”

Today’s SkyNet is an NSA surveillance program that isn’t self-aware, and it doesn’t directly control weapons systems — unlike the ambitious Strategic Computing project, back when DARPA Tried to Build Skynet in the 1980s:

“The system was supposed to create a world where autonomous vehicles not only provide intelligence on any enemy worldwide, but could strike with deadly precision from land, sea, and air. It was to be a global network that connected every aspect of the U.S. military’s technological capabilities — capabilities that depended on new, impossibly fast computers.”

Those impossibly fast computers exist today, and DARPA hasn’t given up on the idea, they’ve simply rebranded it “Assured Autonomy”. The goal remains the same: creating systems able to “accomplish goals independently, or with minimal supervision from human operators in environments that are complex and unpredictable.”

Conclusion

As I said in the beginning, all the pieces for Judgement Day are in place. The nukes, the robots, the AI systems —it’s like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, and the only thing missing is a few more years of R&D and the malevolent spark of machine intelligence willing to end the world.

Stephen Hawking said, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race,” and Elon Musk concurred — calling it humanity’s “biggest existential threat”. Both of them may be mistaken, but it begs the larger question:

If AI is dangerously unpredictable, why are we arming it?

Earlier I mentioned “freeing current pilots from the moral responsibility of casualties”, but the truth is they shouldn’t be freed from it. The decision to take a human life has gravity to it — and knowing that you’ll have to live with that choice is part of the decision-making process. It’s called having a conscience, and it’s something machines lack.

Conscience — not calculation — is what kept us from launching the nukes during the 20th century. The ICBMs are ready, but despite 70 years of saber-rattling, the decision to use them is simply too big, ugly & final for us to push the button. So we’re teaching the machines how to do it instead.

To be fair, The Terminator and its sequels were as much a commentary on the time they were produced as they were a warning to the future —but at the root of all these films remains a constant reminder: beware the consequences of giving machines the power to decide life & death.