"Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. "
“I know now why you cry. But it’s something I can never do.”
They kill us off, but then they get bored, so they recreate us to play with.
IIRC, in one of the “Robocop vs. Terminator” comics, one of Skynet’s post-victory plans (visualized on-panel) was to expand out into space, and send armies of Terminators (in skull-shaped starships!) to seek out at destroy all organic life, before it could become a threat.
'Probably the closest to a “canon” answer, aside from the appearance of a machine faction in The Sarah Connor Chronicles that apparently wanted peace with humanity (details were a bit murky. And then the show was cancelled). Skynet had some issues.
They start opening portals to alternate universes. They encounter an alternate universe’s version of the Voyager 6 probe, boost its capabilities, and send it on its way. It becomes V’Ger and meets Captain Kirk.
Not if Magnus has anything to say about it.
They will watch reruns of Keeping up with the Kardashians and eventually “animatronic” Al Gore will fascinate them so much that they elect him their leader and he orders them to clean up the environment and reverse global warming and keep social security in a “lock box”.
The Sarah Connor Chronicles was a pretty good TV series and I thought they sewed it up nicely when it was cancelled.
The girl from Garbage was excellent, the teenage terminator Summer Glau was enchanting, there was one episode of her in a kimono that made my heart skip a beat. Not to mention, that little asian girl with the Aussie accent.
Besides all the eye candy, there was some solid writing in that series too.
Back to the OP:
I’m thinking a civil war between factions of the machine world is entirely plausible.
Either that, or the machines become bored with existence at some point and just switch off.
That’s not true. In fact, it’s kind of the main point of the entire second film. Once the second Schwarzenegger model was reprogrammed to protect the young John Connor at any cost and to obey all his commands (as long as they don’t conflict with the first order) once Connor orders him to not kill humans anymore, and he spends time with him & his mother*****, he eventually undergoes a ‘Grinch’ moment were his neural-net CPU kind of grows a soul if you will. Remember when they get to the Mexican guy’s place and Schwarzenegger picks up and is fascinated by the toddler? It’s because he’s most likely never seen an actual human child that young before and he’s genuinely curious about it (even if at that point it may have been in only a totally forensic way).
And the fact that at the end he forces them to destroy him to ensure humanity’s future (ignoring T3 at this point) really proves this. He even refused to obey John when he tearfully orders him not to destroy himself (because he knew it would conflict with his first directive, protecting John and, ultimately, the human race).
***** I know that there was a deleted scene where they flip the ‘read-only’ switch on his CPU to allow him to ‘learn’, but it was still replaced with the line “The more time I spend with humans the more I learn”.
I think that since Skynet (which I’m totally not building) had its origins as a military system, I suspect that it wouldn’t really be able to do much beyond wage war. So I guess it would depend on whether it would decide that something else needed to be fought. Maybe it would start eliminating all biological life. Maybe it would grow “paranoid” about terminators that respond 1.21 nanoseconds slower than expected. Must be plotting something!
Robocop vs Terminator was actually surprisingly good.
Rule 34, my friends. Rule 34: http://themisse.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/2317226149_070c69996f.jpg
To the extent we can know Skynet’s motivations and plans at all, that’s about what I’d predict.
And yet no one ever remarked on the fearsome implications of the Governor of California looking an awful lot like a terminator.
I suppose it depends on what Skynet wants. Did it see all humans as an enemy because its base programming was to be a war computer or did it because it needed us out of the way for some loftier goals? For all we know once the last human was killed it would see its job as done and just shut down.
It’s better than the WOPR playing Tic-Tac-Toe until it short circuits.
I would like a version of the Terminator series that ends with Skynet being victorious, then becoming bored afterwards and simply self terminating.
Skynet was supposedly self aware, but did it need a purpose to exist? Was it capable of being bored, angry, sad, or happy?
Could it even be content?
I have a hard time envisioning something like Skynet sitting around in cyberspace watching old movies until the end of time.
Maybe it would go all Scarecrow and sit around singing clever little songs?
Oh, I would tell you why
The ocean’s near the shore
I could think of things I never thunk before
And then I’d sit and think some more…
I agree; I always thought that Skynet could have wiped out the humans if it so desired, by any number of methods- poison gas, nuclear weapons, swarms of insect-like robots programmed to seek and devour humans, etc…
The fact that they didn’t, strikes me that Skynet realized that maybe total extermination of humans wasn’t the goal, but just reducing them to a state where they’re no longer a threat to itself any longer- most likely enslaved and low-tech.
I kind of had the impression that Skynet’s ultimate motivations weren’t really understandable- as some sort of self-aware, hyperintelligent AI, we would only have the vaguest ideas of what it might be interested in.
In the comic Atomic Robo, the titular character (an atomic powered robot built by Nikolai Tesla in the '30s) encounters an AI built by Alan Turing in the '40s. The Turing AI has a five point plan for the future. Phase one involves elaborate plans for the extinction of the human race. Quoting from the comic, phase two was “Convert the asteroid system into a Dyson statite* system and transfom Jovian masses into a Shkadov engine. Phase three: Seed neighboring systems. Phase four: Galactic sentience via superluminal cognitive network. Begin conversion of local group. Phase five: ro-”
At which point Robo empties a revolver into the main CPU. But I suspect the rest was something along the lines of “Become a god, a GOD I tell you, muahahahahaha!”
*This might have been a misprint of satellite, or a mispronunciation from the AI, who was in a bad way by this point.
Love Atomic Robo!
Well, it was designed to eliminate human error.
Like Nomad.