Comments on: Unlikely Terminator Plot Lines

By: Stephen Gordon

Stephen Gordon — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 10:02:54 +0000

John Connor mentioned the Singularity in this week’s show – he put a much darker spin on it than we usually get.

It was something like “its that point when the AI’s can build better AI’s without our help. That’s the time we can kiss our a**es goodbye.”

By: Phil Bowermaster

Phil Bowermaster — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 19:06:57 +0000

The new show may turn out to be reasonably Kurzweilesque if (as some of us suspect) the Summer Glau character is more human than previous terminators. Maybe she’s an enhanced human being, or possibly her mind is based on an uploaded human mind. Either way, she would be an example of the merger of machine and human intelligence.

By: Gramarye

Gramarye — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 18:36:45 +0000

How about …

(3) An intense lobbying effort by Microsoft convinces Congress to mandate that all cyborgs run Windows, guaranteeing that all Terminators’ cybernetic heads-up displays will turn into blue screens of death at least once a day.

Also, Kurzweil’s big prediction is that human and machine intelligence will merge, not that machine intelligence will simply supplant human intelligence. I think a more Kurzweilan (though less warm-and-fuzzy) vision would be an army of Terminators imprinted with human consciousnesses (say, for example, from the preserved memories and personae of dying human soldiers) going head-to-head (or minigun-to-bazooka) with the “purely” mechanical models.