Story here.
You have now lived long enough to see a news headline like this delivered in all seriousness.
If there is a sudden spate of Sarah Connors being killed all around the same time, I’ll start to worry.
Heh.
Uh, yeah, and beyond the reach of lots of human intelligence, too…
Kill 'em all and let HAL sort them out!
News is finally catching up to science fiction. The Killer Robot is an old idea in SF, long predating The Terminator. Look up
Philip K. Dick’s “Second Variety” (1953) Second Variety - Wikipedia
Kate Wilhelm’s “The Killer Thing” (1969)
Robert Sheckley’s “Watchbird” (1953) (This one was filmed for the TV series “Masters of Science Fiction” last year, but never aired)
Harry Harrison’s “The War with the Robots” (1962, although I believe the stories are earlier)
…and others.
I realize that it’s an easy thing to come up with an idea and claim to have invented it, but this one seems kind of obvious, especially considering that the earliest of these was written just after WWII, when there was still plenty of unexploded ordnance, and when the war involved mobile, unmanned devices, it wasn’t a huge leap to imagine mechanical intelligences used as guidance systems, and extrapolate from there. The miniaturization of computers and Moore’s Law have finally made that enough of a reality for it to become a real threat.
First thing I thought of. I read that story when I was much too young and it scared teh crap out of me. Although it did put the phrase “slag and ash” in my vocabulary.
Hey! You clean up your own apocalyptic mess, mister!
Also made into the movie “Screamers”.
Heh heh heh.
Yeah. Seen it. Not particularly thrilled. As someone pointed out, though, the “flashback” (Flashforward?) scenes in the original Terminator are practically stolen from Second variety. More than from Ellison’s work, IMHO.