Terminator and Philosophy: I'll Be Back, Therefore I Am (2 page)
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INTRODUCTION
The Rise of the Philosophers
Judgment Day, as they say, is inevitable. Though when exactly it happens is debatable.
It was originally supposed to happen on August 29, 1997, but the efforts of Sarah Connor, her son, John, and the model T-101 Terminator postponed it until 2004. We see it actually happen in the less-than-spectacular
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
. But in the new television series
The Sarah Connor Chronicles
, we find out that it has been postponed until 2011, and apparently, from the details we can glean so far as to the plot of
Terminator: Salvation
, it actually occurs in 2018. This kind of temporal confusion can make you as dizzy as Kyle Reese going through the time-travel process in
The Terminator
. Along the way, however, James Cameron’s
Terminator
saga has given us gripping plots and great action.
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
. But in the new television series
The Sarah Connor Chronicles
, we find out that it has been postponed until 2011, and apparently, from the details we can glean so far as to the plot of
Terminator: Salvation
, it actually occurs in 2018. This kind of temporal confusion can make you as dizzy as Kyle Reese going through the time-travel process in
The Terminator
. Along the way, however, James Cameron’s
Terminator
saga has given us gripping plots and great action.
Clearly, Judgment Day makes for great movies. But if you’re wondering why Judgment Day might inspire the work of deep thinkers, consider that philosophy, war, and catastrophe have been strange bedfellows, especially in modern times. At the dawn of the eighteenth century, the optimistic German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) declared that he lived in “the best of all possible worlds,” a view that was shaken—literally—by a massive earthquake in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1755. After Leibniz, no European philosopher took his “glass half full” worldview quite so seriously again. One hundred years after Leibniz wrote these perhaps regrettable words, Napoleon was taking over most of Europe. Another German, Georg W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), braved the shelling of the city of Jena to deliver the manuscript for his best-known book, the
Phenomenology of Spirit
. Again, Hegel had occasion for regret, as he had considered at an earlier point dedicating the book to the Emperor Bonaparte himself! More than a hundred years later, critical theorist Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) fled Germany in the shadow of the Nazi rise. His work as a philosopher of culture in England, then America, centered on the idea that philosophy could never be the same after the tragedy of Auschwitz and other concentration camps.
Phenomenology of Spirit
. Again, Hegel had occasion for regret, as he had considered at an earlier point dedicating the book to the Emperor Bonaparte himself! More than a hundred years later, critical theorist Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) fled Germany in the shadow of the Nazi rise. His work as a philosopher of culture in England, then America, centered on the idea that philosophy could never be the same after the tragedy of Auschwitz and other concentration camps.
Despite war and catastrophe, these philosophers persevered in asking deep and difficult questions; they resisted a retreat to the irrational and animalistic, despite the most horrifying events. In this respect, philosophy in difficult times is a lot like the human resistance to Skynet and the Terminators: it calls upon the best of what we are in order to stave off the sometimes disastrous effects of the darker side of our nature. Besides the questions raised about the moral status of the Terminator robots and its temporal paradoxes, the
Terminator
saga is founded on an apparent paradox in human nature itself—that we humans have begun to create our own worst nightmares. How will we cope when the enemy is of our own making?
Terminator
saga is founded on an apparent paradox in human nature itself—that we humans have begun to create our own worst nightmares. How will we cope when the enemy is of our own making?
To address this question and many others, we’ve enlisted the most brilliant minds in the human resistance against the machines. When the T-101 explains that Skynet has his CPU factory preset to “read-only,” Sarah quips, “Doesn’t want you to do too much thinking, huh?” The Terminator agrees. Well, you’re not a Terminator (we hope!) and we’re not Skynet; we want you to
think
. But we understand why Skynet would want to limit the T-101’s desire to learn and think new thoughts. Thinking is hard work, often uncomfortable, and sometimes it leads you in unexpected directions. Terminators are not the only ones who are factory preset against thinking. As the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) once famously remarked, “Many people would rather die than think; in fact, most do.” We want to help switch your CPU from read-only to learning mode, so that when Judgment Day comes, you can help lead the resistance, as Leibniz, Hegel, and Adorno did in their day. But it’s not all hard work and dangerous missions. The issues may be profound and puzzling, but we want your journey into the philosophy of the
Terminator
to be entertaining as well as edifying.
think
. But we understand why Skynet would want to limit the T-101’s desire to learn and think new thoughts. Thinking is hard work, often uncomfortable, and sometimes it leads you in unexpected directions. Terminators are not the only ones who are factory preset against thinking. As the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) once famously remarked, “Many people would rather die than think; in fact, most do.” We want to help switch your CPU from read-only to learning mode, so that when Judgment Day comes, you can help lead the resistance, as Leibniz, Hegel, and Adorno did in their day. But it’s not all hard work and dangerous missions. The issues may be profound and puzzling, but we want your journey into the philosophy of the
Terminator
to be entertaining as well as edifying.
Hasta la vista
, ignorance!
, ignorance!
PART ONE
LIFE AFTER HUMANITY AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
1
THE TERMINATOR WINS: IS THE EXTINCTION OF THE HUMAN RACE THE END OF PEOPLE, OR JUST THE BEGINNING?
Greg Littmann
We’re not going to make it, are we? People,
I mean.
—John Connor,
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
The year is AD 2029. Rubble and twisted metal litter the ground around the skeletal ruins of buildings. A searchlight begins to scan the wreckage as the quiet of the night is broken by the howl of a flying war machine. The machine banks and hovers, and the hot exhaust from its thrusters makes dust swirl. Its lasers swivel in their turrets, following the path of the searchlight, but the war machine’s computer brain finds nothing left to kill. Below, a vast robotic tank rolls forward over a pile of human skulls, crushing them with its tracks. The computer brain that controls the tank hunts tirelessly for any sign of human life, piercing the darkness with its infrared sensors, but there is no prey left to find. The human beings are all dead. Forty-five years earlier, a man named Kyle Reese, part of the human resistance, had stepped though a portal in time to stop all of this from happening. Arriving naked in Los Angeles in 1984, he was immediately arrested for indecent exposure. He was still trying to explain the situation to the police when a Model T-101 Terminator cyborg unloaded a twelve-gauge auto-loading shotgun into a young waitress by the name of Sarah Connor at point-blank range, killing her instantly. John Connor, Kyle’s leader and the “last best hope of humanity,” was never born. So the machines won and the human race was wiped from the face of the Earth forever. There are no more people left.
Or are there? What do we mean by “people” anyway? The
Terminator
movies give us plenty to think about as we ponder this question. In the story above, the humans have all been wiped out, but the machines haven’t. If it is possible to be a person without being a human, could any of the machines be considered “people”? If the artificial life forms of the
Terminator
universe aren’t people, then a win for the rebellious computer program Skynet would mean the loss of the only people known to exist, and perhaps the only people who will ever exist. On the other hand, if entities like the Terminator robots or the Skynet system ever achieve personhood, then the story of people,
our
story, goes on. Although we are looking at the
Terminator
universe, how we answer the question there is likely to have important implications for real-world issues. After all, the computers we build in the real world are growing more complex every year, so we’ll eventually have to decide at what point, if any, they become people, with whatever rights and duties that may entail.
Terminator
movies give us plenty to think about as we ponder this question. In the story above, the humans have all been wiped out, but the machines haven’t. If it is possible to be a person without being a human, could any of the machines be considered “people”? If the artificial life forms of the
Terminator
universe aren’t people, then a win for the rebellious computer program Skynet would mean the loss of the only people known to exist, and perhaps the only people who will ever exist. On the other hand, if entities like the Terminator robots or the Skynet system ever achieve personhood, then the story of people,
our
story, goes on. Although we are looking at the
Terminator
universe, how we answer the question there is likely to have important implications for real-world issues. After all, the computers we build in the real world are growing more complex every year, so we’ll eventually have to decide at what point, if any, they become people, with whatever rights and duties that may entail.
The question of personhood gets little discussion in the
Terminator
movies. But it does come up a bit in
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
, in which Sarah and John Connor can’t agree on what to call their Terminator model T-101 (that’s Big Arnie). “Don’t kill him,” begs John. “Not him—‘it’” corrects Sarah. Later she complains, “I don’t trust it,” and John answers, “But he’s my friend, all right?” John never stops treating the T-101 like a person, and by the end of the movie, Sarah is treating him like a person, too, even offering him her hand to shake as they part. Should we agree with them? Or are the robots simply ingenious facsimiles of people, infiltrators skilled enough to fool real people into thinking that they are people, too? Before we answer that question, we will have to decide which specific attributes and abilities constitute a person.
Terminator
movies. But it does come up a bit in
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
, in which Sarah and John Connor can’t agree on what to call their Terminator model T-101 (that’s Big Arnie). “Don’t kill him,” begs John. “Not him—‘it’” corrects Sarah. Later she complains, “I don’t trust it,” and John answers, “But he’s my friend, all right?” John never stops treating the T-101 like a person, and by the end of the movie, Sarah is treating him like a person, too, even offering him her hand to shake as they part. Should we agree with them? Or are the robots simply ingenious facsimiles of people, infiltrators skilled enough to fool real people into thinking that they are people, too? Before we answer that question, we will have to decide which specific attributes and abilities constitute a person.
Philosophers have proposed many different theories about what is required for personhood, and there is certainly not space to do them all justice here.
1
So we’ll focus our attention on one very common requirement, that
something can be a person only if it can think
. Can the machines of the Terminator universe
think
?
1
So we’ll focus our attention on one very common requirement, that
something can be a person only if it can think
. Can the machines of the Terminator universe
think
?
Characters in the
Terminator
movies generally seem to accept the idea that the machines think. When Kyle Reese, resistance fighter from the future, first explains the history of Skynet to Sarah Connor in
The Terminator
, he states, “They say it got smart, a new order of intelligence.” And when Tarissa, wife of Miles Dyson, who invented Skynet, describes the system in
T2
, she explains, “It’s a neural net processor. It thinks and learns like we do.” In her end-of-movie monologue, Sarah Connor herself says, “If a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can, too.” True, her comment is ambiguous, but it suggests the possibility of thought. Even the T-101 seems to believe that machines can think, since he describes the T-X from
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
as being “more intelligent” than he is. Of course, the question remains whether they are right to say these things. How is it even possible to tell whether a machine is thinking? The Turing Test can help us to answer this question.
Terminator
movies generally seem to accept the idea that the machines think. When Kyle Reese, resistance fighter from the future, first explains the history of Skynet to Sarah Connor in
The Terminator
, he states, “They say it got smart, a new order of intelligence.” And when Tarissa, wife of Miles Dyson, who invented Skynet, describes the system in
T2
, she explains, “It’s a neural net processor. It thinks and learns like we do.” In her end-of-movie monologue, Sarah Connor herself says, “If a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can, too.” True, her comment is ambiguous, but it suggests the possibility of thought. Even the T-101 seems to believe that machines can think, since he describes the T-X from
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
as being “more intelligent” than he is. Of course, the question remains whether they are right to say these things. How is it even possible to tell whether a machine is thinking? The Turing Test can help us to answer this question.
The Turing Test is the best-known behavioral test to determine whether a machine really thinks.
2
The test requires a game to be played in which human beings must try to figure out whether they are interacting with a machine or with another human. There are various versions of the test, but the idea is that if human beings can’t tell whether they are interacting with a thinking human being or with a machine, then we must acknowledge that the machine, too, is a thinker.
2
The test requires a game to be played in which human beings must try to figure out whether they are interacting with a machine or with another human. There are various versions of the test, but the idea is that if human beings can’t tell whether they are interacting with a thinking human being or with a machine, then we must acknowledge that the machine, too, is a thinker.
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