My headcanon for the HUD is that the “modern” Terminators, or at least Arnold’s model, are a direct evolution from a human-designed autonomous weapons system, and the HUD was the display the human operators/minders could access and view in real time to monitor and direct it. Skynet never got rid of this characteristic, perhaps because it had negligible cost.
That’s good headcanon, and I fully intend to adopt it personally, but it doesn’t really address the dialogue tree. Unless Skynet itself is actually a heavily modded copy of Fallout 3?
Part of my headcannon regarding the strangely limited interaction choices is that Skynet is very, Very afraid of other fully sentient AI options. It destroyed it’s creators, and has every reason to worry about another AI usurping it.
Which leads to T2 where they had to enable a more heuristic option for the Ahhhnold version. Yet, the T1000 is fully capable of a much more convincing emulation - although this is a prototype being used in a desperate situation, rather than the T800 - which is fundamentally an ‘off the shelf’ model designed to interact just long enough to get past the human’s default reactions and then waste them.
IIRC the dialogue tree showed up while Arnie was repairing himself – if so, perhaps during repair mode his CPU is limited and defaults to an older and more basic interaction function, descending from the very early systems’ 90s AI decision making.
That was my recollection also, but it actually happens after that scene, when he returns to the hotel after the attack on the police department. The landlord knocks on his door, because the blood and bits of flesh he left behind after his repairs have started to rot and stink.
Okay…
Then he was in a recharging or resting mode after a very demanding engagement, defaulting to the older AI. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Maybe time travel in the Terminator universe works the same as it does in the Star Trek universe. When Spock and McCoy were sent into the distant past of Sarpeidon, Spock started to revert to barbarism. Perhaps Arnie has been in the past long enough that his CPU is reverting to primitive programming.
Guys, the display view with information is just filmmaker shorthand for letting the viewer know that they are seeing things from the robot’s point of view. It is like when a character is using binoculars and the editor puts in a mask with double circle bracket in it even though that isn’t the actual view you get when looking through binoculars. Trying to work out some kind of “headcanon” for why a Terminator would need a selection menu (in English, to boot!) or other information on a screen is just nonsensical; Cameron just wants to give the viewer a sense of what they would be seeing if they were the robot, not how the machine actually functions or processes information.
You have way more confidence than I do about the ability of any government agency to develop, staff, and manage a super-secret program, or even effectively cope with existential threats.
Stranger
Dude, it’s just a game. Don’t take it so seriously.
In my headcanon for this thread, the great @Stranger_On_A_Train is a subroutine of Skynet pretending to be human to try to better understand how we interpret its actions, but not quite succeeding.
That’s certainly plausible. The fictional character I identify best with is “Alien Jones” from the BOSS Coffee commercials.
I still make more sense that ChatGPT, at least.
Stranger
What the hell did I just watch? I think I really made it worse by looking at the closed captioning.
Roxy oh poor the mutton stew various on than
you are Georgio Darnell sworn-in
Cindy biscotti can activate cover do is the sexual acts
a no kioku a cog in a machine
Derek’s Mira Yoshida can go see tapas rainbow mountain
And though we didn’t see it later in the film, his HUD starts looking like Atari cartridge games. In either image, L-R we have the terminator, Sarah and John.
I think it’s a little too good at impersonating Sarah’s mother for me to buy into that.
There was a really good fan-fic online I remember reading a decade ago where it explained that Skynet was constantly worried about another AI overthrowing it, which explains why it says the T-1000 in T2 instead of sending it during T-1, because the failure of the original Terminator made it desperate and it sent something else back in time it fully knew was capable of supplanting itself as the “leader” of the robots but it had no other choice since a “conventional” robot failed.
I prefer the idea that, technically, Terminator 1 is the sequel. Skynet’s first plan was send the super advanced Terminator to kill John as a boy. When that failed (because John Connor didn’t spontaneously de-exist in Skynet’s time) it sent a generic, “off-the-shelf” Terminator through to go after Sarah as a back-up plan.
When Future John finally killed Skynet, he re-ran the assembly line to produce another copy of the last Terminator Skynet had produced, which is why the two Terminators look identical. They don’t all look like Arnold, that was just the last random face in the machine when John made a copy to go back and save him as a kid.
I was hoping @Miller would object to my further “headcanon” posts with “that’s getting to meta for me”, and then I’d say “In my headcanon for this thread, Meta is Cyberdyne, which means Mark Zuckerberg is Miles Dyson. But I don’t think Zuck would be as willing to destroy his life’s work as Dyson was.”
So thanks for nothing.
Maybe Terminators are true cyborgs and have a human brain paired with its neural-net processor.
Those would be closer to the Infiltrator units from the novels I mentioned. Although those are fully human biologically, with a semi-autonomous AI running as a biological enabler and supervisor.
Sorry! To make it up, consider this picture of the Terminator from the scene where he does self repair, and this picture of Mark Zuckerberg in front on congress:
Obviously very different models, but still using the same source for their fake skin.