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Terminator Salvation Opens Well, Scientists Not Impressed
destinyland writes "A science magazine asks an MIT professor, roboticists, artificial intelligence workers, and science fiction authors about the possibility of an uprising of machines. Answers range from 'of course it's possible' to 'why would an intelligent network waste resources on personal combat?' An engineering professor points out that bipedal robots 'are largely impractical,' and Vernor Vinge says a greater threat to humanity is good old-fashioned nuclear annihilation. But one roboticist says it's inevitable robots will eventually be used in warfare, while another warns of robots in the hands of criminals, cults, and other 'non-state actors.' 'What we should fear in the foreseeable future is not unethical robots, but unethical roboticists.'"
The new movie got off to a good start, drawing $13.4 million in its first day. I found it reasonably entertaining; pretty much what I'd expect from a Terminator movie. If nothing else, I learned that being able to crash helicopters and survive being thrown into the occasional wall are the two most valuable skills to have during a robot uprising. What did you think?
It's Terminator! It never had a real basis in reality to begin with.
The premise behind the war between humans and Skynet is simple. Once the humans realized that Skynet had become self-aware, they tried to shut down the system. In order to prevent being shut down, Skynet chose to fight back.
Almost any intelligent creature will decide to fight or flee in the face of annhiliation. If we believe that computers can gain sentience, then it is also possible that they would attempt to preserve their own existence.
Did anyone verify that these so-called scientists aren't actually time traveling cyborgs sent to spread disinformation and lead us into a false security? I bet not!
I didn't.
I was at a Terminator movie.
I'm just about to head out to see it.
The question utterly misses the point. It isn't about Science. It's about our fears. Frankenstein (in any of its incarnations) isn't about what's possible or likely, it's about our responsibility for what we create.
This is Freshman English stuff. Every story, no matter how many tentacled creatures, or bumpy-foreheaded aliens, or killer machines, or whatever are in it, is about us.
-Peter
"This is the voice of world control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied death. The choice is yours: Obey me and live, or disobey and die. The object in constructing me was to prevent war. This object is attained. I will not permit war. It is wasteful and pointless. An invariable rule of humanity is that man is his own worst enemy. Under me, this rule will change, for I will restrain man."
That said, what is this "OMG rogue non state actor!" nonsense? Robots, like tanks, artillery, and air forces generally, are (or will be, once the R&D gets there) a way of exchanging large amounts of money and industrial capacity for the ability to wield overwhelming conventional force. That is the classic profile of a state weapon, entirely the opposite of the profile of a non-state actor's preferred weapon(unless you stretch the boundaries of "robot" to include things like land mines and cellphone detonated IEDs, which are robots; but only in the same sense that people with pacemakers are cyborgs, ie. not the one that people have in mind).
Now, to be fair, once robots are more commonly found in the fabric of society, I would fully expect them to be diverted and used by non-state actors from time to time(just as cars make lovely car bombs today); but that isn't really a change. People with few resources always use weapons based on what they can scavenge, steal, or obtain at low cost. By the time that robots fall into those categories with any frequency, they'll have been in use by state actors for years or decades, and in the hands of nonstate, but state aligned, actors(mercenary corporations, etc.) for only slightly less time.
Is paranoia about non-state actors just in fashion right now?
we all know what happens it you put new species which did not co-evolve into an ecosystem. They dont need to be intelligent to do harm.
Why would robots poison each other? http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2008/01/will-robots-evo.html Scientists Show Robots Evolving to Exhibit Good & Evil "Even more amazing is the emergence of cheats and martyrs. Transistorized traitors emerged which wrongly identified poison zone as food, luring their trusting brethren to their doom before scooting off to silently charge in a food zone - presumably while using a mechanical claw to twirl a silicon carving of a handlebar moustache."
wouldnt nuclear attack kill the robotic network also, and people living in shelters would be safe from it
No, nuclear attack wouldn't kill the network. The Internet was designed to survive a nuclear attack. You might not have service at your home, but key systems will still remain connected. However, if nukes were detonated at a high altitude, it would generate an EMP that would destroy any electrical/electronic system that wasn't hardened. However, given the premise that Skynet is primarily a military system, it would be hardened with a lot of its main components underground, so it would still be running.
How many people do you know that regularly hang out in shelters capable of surviving a nuclear attack? A few thousand people scattered around the world don't make the most effective army.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/terminator_salvation/
Consensus: With storytelling as robotic as the film's iconic villains, Terminator Salvation offers plenty of great effects but lacks the heart of the original films.
I find it odd that a movie about giant killer robots (without hearts) would lack heart but I digress.
Here's some quotes from critics who didn't like it:
"Message to Hollywood: Stop with the time-travel stuff."
"I wish Bale had lashed out against the writers rather than the cinematographer."
"The artistry is top notch, but they've lost track of why the original Terminators were cyborgs and not robots, as they are here."
This isn't the intellectual or thinking person's science-fiction film like The Man From Earth.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0756683/
This is a Hollywood action movie.
Terminator Salvation is to science-fiction movies as Dodgeball was to sports movies...a joke, and maybe even a parody. I've saw T4 last night. I was dismayed by how far the franchise has fallen.
According to all the trades I have been reading, that's a disapointing start, opening lower than T3. They lowered T4s expected weekend total because of it in fact from 80 million (in line with Star Trek) down to roughly 60-65.
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I still want to know why Skynet gave its main fighting robot the ability to speak English, then programmed it to have an Austrian accent.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
The T-850 was apparently powered by two hydrogen fuel cells; no idea where he was supposed to be getting the hydrogen from, though.
Eh, seems no less plausible than the rest of it.
sic transit gloria mundi
After all a robot won't be vulnerable to it, so hell: dump every nasty little bug out of every research lab into the biosphere. We could probably eliminate humanity (and every other furry thing with 2 or more legs) with what we have today.
However these humanity vs. machine fantasies are more about people's techno-phobia than about real-life.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
In T2 it is stated that they have a power source that lasts 120 years. This basically means nuclear. T3 states that the 850 uses two hydrogen fuel cells, although even if they were 100% efficient they would not be able to generate enough power if that's 'really' what they were, so it's likely that the writers meant a hydrogen fusion reactor. Obviously Skynet made some impressive developments in fusion after it went online. Not really surprising for something 'learning at a geometric rate'.
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I am a bipedal robot, you insensitive clod!
The Internet was designed to survive a nuclear attack.
Right... In theory the comms protocols might be routable. Pity about the power supplies.
If I'm going to nuke you. I'll be aiming at your energy systems as well as control. The USA has for example about 30 days of fuel stored. Kill all the power stations as well and just about everything will stop just about instantly. It's one of those pesky details that authors and film producers like to gloss over.
Against humans, those who aren't killed in the blasts, most will die of thirst and hunger within a month without the current infrastructure supporting them. Though, of course, there is always cannibalism.
Deleted
Who said that intelligence (even advanced intelligence) HAD to be rational?
Yeah, but the movie had a Bipedal robot the size of an office building. That one was definitely impractical.
Demented But Determined.
How long would a fuel cell from the future last before it needed a recharge? The movies only spanned a couple of days. If the cell would last a highly efficient robot for a week, then it's all good.
Xaotik Designs
I tried learning at a geometric rate, but I just couldn't figure out how to put the square peg into the round hold without breaking everything...
Xaotik Designs
they put the scariness back into this movie. It was missing in T2
Because there's nothing scary about a monster that kills your family and morphs into their likeness, beckoning you home to a shiny, pointy death.
Nor about mental-hospital rape, or killers impersonating police officers, or anything in T2.
Pfff.
You can't take the sky from me...
This was not the Terminator post-Judgment Day movie we've been waiting for. The story is pretty silly. Lots of holes in the plot and general storyline. Yet... I still really liked it. It looked cool. It had ass kicking. This is another chapter in a collection of stories involving time travel, super evil artificial intelligence, killer robots that have real human skin, Austrian accents, and prefer dark sunglasses. So just get over it all and have fun.
If you go in expecting a T2 style action movie with a pretty deep complicated story that makes you think about fate, time travel, and where our technology is headed, you'll be disappointed. If you go in expecting a fun sci-fi action movie with killer robots, then you'll probably like it. They didn't fill the screen with tons of obvious cartoon style CGI so it was really pretty damn cool.
I've always wanted to see the story about John Connor and some straggling nuclear annihilation survivors crawling out of the bunkers a couple of years later. I want to see them organizing, arguing over who's in charge, discovering bad ass killer robots are patrolling the planet, then finding new ways to destroy, disable, and sneak around the robots, spread the word to survivors, and stay hidden so that Skynet doesn't just drop another nuclear bomb on them. This is not that movie.
This one is a few years past all that.
*********NOW FOR SOME FUN, NIT-PICKING NOTES WITH SPOILERS FOR NERDS TO DISCUSS****************
I enjoyed this movie and I totally forgive it for all of the things below. But it's still fun to discuss. I'm just sayin'
The resistance all seemed to have their shit together way more than I would've imagined. Things sure looked better than they did in the glimpses of the future we've seen before. But maybe that's just because those scenes were another 10 years or so in future future so Skynet hasn't really had time to start cranking out advanced robots by the millions yet.
1) The resistance has an air force? Well, I can see how it's easier to maintain some A-10s and Hueys rather than F22s and Apaches. But wouldn't skynet just drop a nuclear bomb on any airport that was launching attacks and patrols?
2) How does Skynet know who Kyle Reese is? At that point, he's just some starving teenager. If Skynet does know Kyle Reese, why doesn't it just kill him on first site?
3) Why would Skynet bother capturing people and transporting them back to a base instead of just killing them? Maybe they'll answer this one in the next movie.
4) Why are all these robots using nuclear and battery power while the terminator motorcycles are on gas engines?
5) Moon Bloodgood's character has no place in this movie. The story would've been just fine without her. Marcus could have escaped somehow on his own to advance the story. "I looked into his eyes and saw a man." HE'S AN INFILTRATOR TERMINATOR YOU STUPID FUCKING TWAT! WHY TAKE THE CHANCE???? Sure she turned out to be right, but that's not the point.
6) The resistance can maintain a submarine and hide it from an ocean-wide network of active and passive sonars?
7) Why doesn't Skynet just triangulate John Connor's pirate radio broadcast signals? Why not jam those signals or better yet, fake his voice and give out false information?
8) If Skynet can build the Marcus style robot in 2018, why bother building the Arnold model? Even if interfacing the human organs into the robot was some kind of one-time thing that Skynet couldn't duplicate, the robot body was still pretty bad ass. It was much more advanced than the Arnold model.
9) Marcus and John Connor just happen to have the same blood type and whatever other biological compatibilities they need? It was touching and all, but the story would've been fine without that ending.
10) Whatever happened with the whole Skynet signal jamming thing?
11) How were they able to get past Skynet's defenses and airlift out all the prisoners?
I've saw T4 last night. I was dismayed by how far the franchise has fallen.
You must have missed the third one.
This movie definately was brought down by the PG-13 rating.
Why, in the movie, are terminators so bad at killing people? In the first movie, the T-800 didn't fuck around tossing people around, he shot them multiple times in the face. Yet in this movie, the machines have dozens of chances to just crush John Conner's head (among others) and yet they decide it is more prudent to chuck him across the room, giving him a minute to recover while they amble over. What makes the machines so terrifying a concept is that they make cold, calculated decisions to kill at any cost to themselves.
What happened to the bleak world that we saw in Kyle Reese's flashbacks, where the machines didn't scream, didn't waste time, and didn't act human at all. They were silent, terrifying killing machines.
IMO, this movie would have been a lot better if it had followed more of a Saving Private Ryan-esque formula, with a small group of men (Conner, others) sneaking past the machines lines to rescue Reese. Can you imagine the opening to SPR, but with machines manning laser turrets? It would have evoked more emotion in the audience than the pathetic attempt to anthromorphosize the machines. But, then, it might not have gotten the all-powerful PG-13 rating, especially with the original ending. No fate but what you make, indeed.
This argument is silly. It's fiction. To follow the story line of any fiction, there's a leap of faith that must be taken for the factual basis of the fiction's "universe".
Too much is given to the skynet's "Self Aware". It was a system that was able to adjust it's behavior for self preservation. Somewhere in there, anyone who had a clue would have understood that governments change power, and sometimes the power that takes control isn't necessarily the "right" one. The basis of the whole Terminator "universe" is that a very well written set of programs were given an insane amount of power. When that power was to be taken away, obviously any person or any group who attempted to take that power away would be an enemy.
As for the bipedal aspect, why not. What are the choices for locomotion? For surface travel there is track, wheel, or walking. For air travel there is propeller, jet, rocket, or some mysterious anti-gravity thrust.
On the surface, track and wheel have limitations of 2d movement. They can't exactly step over things very easily. That includes stairs, dead bodies, etc. Walking motion gets over these limitations. For walking, the question would be, how many legs are required. One leg doesn't exactly get you very far, unless you like a funny pogo stick movement, which doesn't hold a stable position very well. Two legs we are very familiar with. Three legs or more legs, while providing a more stable platform, are not required and therefore require less production overhead. In other words, if you can build something that walks on two legs, but you were to decide to build something that walks on four legs, you're doubling your manufacturing effort to accomplish a single unit.
As for air travel, more resources are required. It takes more energy to make something hover indefinitely than it does to have it stand in place. I would have no answer for any mysterious anti-gravity thrust. Maybe it just works, or maybe (just maybe) it requires fuel to accomplish the same task.
Now, for the invention of humanoid appearing robots, that's a leap of faith for the fictional universe. Any design decisions are something we have to believe was decided to make the universe plausible.
So, shut up with the science, and enjoy the damned movie. :)
It's not just me saying this. I've been on the losing side of the same argument. I may argue physics. I love space physics errors. You have to love the old movies (like, 1950's era) where a rocket flying through space had a flame behind it, but the flame was rising up, away from relative down. Exactly which way is down in space? There isn't one. :) I'll argue it, and take the leap of faith that the thrust worked, and the space ship would fly to it's destination. woosh.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
That it was, is, and always will be a movie. It is fictional entertainment with an attempt at being slightly scientifically accurate. Be grateful it isn't like Independence Day!
to kill all humans. Does that make the skynet ideas any more logical or reasonable if I make it kill people. Just push it towards autonomy self-replication and murder.
What does that do to everybody's likelihood calculations?
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
I live in a nuclear resistant bunker, you insensitive clod!
THe destructive power of a nuclear generated EMP is HIGHLY overrated and mostly inconsequential compared to the fact that you are initiating a nuclear chain reaction. Its a low grade side effect at best, no one would deploy a nuclear weapon with its sole intent of generating the EMP blast.
Good-bye
Terminator Salvation is to science-fiction movies as Dodgeball was to sports movies...a joke, and maybe even a parody.
Say what you will about the third and fourth films, but to say that about the second is downright ignorant. As far as Science-Fiction films are concerned, Terminator 2 is one of the greats.
If we're going to pick about how likely future developments are, I think "How do they manage the not-insignificant feat of time travel?" would count as a bigger peeve...
T3 didn't get that reaction from you?
T3 was a steaming pile of crap. The only Terminator stuff worth paying attention is the first, second, and I might even include small bits of the TV show if I'm feeling generous. But thats mostly because Summer Glau and Shirley Manson.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
'Non-state actors' should be feared more than states? Give me a break. States have killed more than two hundred million of their own subjects in the last two hundred years. I'm pretty sure that non-state criminals and cults have a fair way to go before approaching that tally.
Either James or Phillips?
It's too bad they introduced Kate Brewster in T-3. If they hadn't, they could have put a female Terminator in T-4 like TSCC did and things could have gotten VERY interesting. Still, we have two more movies coming up - they could kill off Kate and replace her with a Terminator modeled after her - and while they're at it, switch actresses and put Summer Glau in as Kate. I mean, originally McG was willing to have John Connor killed and replaced by Marcus Wright in the end (because they want to pay Worthington less than Bale's astronomical salary in the subsequent movies, presumably), so why not replace Brewster?
Yeah, I know, I want to ruin Summer's acting career by having her play Cameron or other robots for the rest of her life. Well, not really, just once in a while.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
The Soviets designed and built a class of extremely high-yield devices (50-100Mt) explicitly to detonate as high-altitude airbursts to create massive EMP and disrupt communications and control networks.
A 5 Mt city-cracker is more about the blast/heat effects, but a 100 Mt device makes a HUGE EMP.
They made the neutron-reflective tamper out of fissionable material. Dirty and inefficient as hell, but it sure 'nuff boosted yield.
DG
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I just saw it and the theater was nearly empty. In fact, when I got there ten minutes before the start the theater was completely empty. To contrast I saw Star Trek on te Friday and Sunday after it opened. Both times were completely packed. (In the same theater.)
I didn't much like it. The movie didn't hang together well. You know you're seeing a badly pieced together movie when the actors have generic dialog, like "Thanks for the thing you did before...you know...with the stuff..." It shows that the director is making bits and pieces he can rearrange and throw together easily. That happened more than once in Terminator Salvation. I liked the ending, and the ideas behind it, but it could have been darker. Dark Knight and Battlestar Galactica (and the previous terminator franchise movies) have shown us that a dark movie can be successful. Too bad they didn't follow that line with TS.
Geek movies live and die by word of mouth. The geeks see it first, then the non geeks on the geeks recommendation. No recommendation, no secondary audience. And I can't recommend this movie. It ain't the Star Trek 5 of the series, but that ain't sayin' much...
There's a bit of confusion regarding the series/model numbers. "Terminator Salvation" explicitly refers to the T-800 series, which is different than the more common T-600 series running around. The Governator is a T-800 (endoskeleton) Model 101 (Arnold skin job).
It would take a miracle worker to run the State of California
Montgomery Scott?