Small Black Screens Are Your Only God Now
Are we ignoring the demise of humanity that’s right in front of our faces?
My mom let me watch two rated “R” movies well before people in the 1980s and 90s would have deemed my age appropriate. The first was Rambo, but that was because I was already watching the Saturday morning Rambo cartoon and playing the Nintendo video game. The second was Terminator 2: Judgement Day (or T2 as it became abbreviated).
T2 still ranks among the top 100 movies on IMDb and is within my top favorites. For the uninitiated, the storyline involves artificially aware robots sent back in time to murder the leader of the human resistance, John Connor. In T2, a machine reprogrammed by the human resistance (played by the iconic Arnold Schwarzenegger) goes back in time to protect Connor from another Terminator.
Throughout the narrative, John Connor, his mother, and the good Terminator (Schwarzenegger) seek to destroy a company named Skynet working on machine learning and AI. In the distant future, Skynet gives way to self-aware robots who launch nukes in an attempt to destroy humanity. This kicks off a dystopian future where humans and machines fight each other.
In the 1990s, T2 was science fiction. But, self-aware robots and machine learning are no longer fantasy. There are…
