Any fan of Terminator knows it, the saga of films that started forty years ago, with the original title from 1984, directed by James Cameron and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as the nearly indestructible humanoid robot who travels back in time in search of Sarah Connor, the woman who will give birth to John Connor, the man who in the future will lead the resistance against Skynet, an artificial intelligence designed as a defense system that wants to take over the planet.
What do you know? That August 29 is “Judgment Day”, the date on which, according to the film’s plot, the artificial intelligence Skynet begins its fight against the humanity that created it. But the phrase circulating on social media is, unfortunately, incorrect. It says: “Let me tell you that in May 1984, Karl Reese told Sara Connor that Skynet would awaken on August 29, 2024, at 02:14 hrs and would kill three billion people… Today is the 29th, and the AI has already been created.”
To begin with, the date (August 29) is only mentioned in Terminator Genesis, released in 2015 with Emilia Clarke at the helm. The phrase is spoken by the man who -like the Terminator- travels back in time to meet Sarah Connor: he is Kyle Reese, the father of John Connor. But Judgment Day is not in 2024, but in 1997: the date is chosen based on that 1984 in which John Connor is conceived. It clarifies how, back then, they believed that general artificial intelligence (that is, self-aware) was just a few years away.
It was a fear of the time: at the film’s release date (the last years of the Cold War, and five years before the fall of the Berlin Wall) the fear was, above all, in the growing automation of defense systems, and in the belief that one of them could make a negative decision on behalf of humanity. A year before Terminator, WarGames premiered, where the teenager played by Matthew Broderick becomes friends with another artificial intelligence, Joshua, which in that fateful 1983 confuses reality with a game and brings the world to the brink of total thermonuclear war.
Today, it is true, we have at our fingertips generative AIs such as ChatGPT or Gemini, but they are very, very far from being capable of waging a war against humanity (if they ever manage to do so). There’s still time: T-800, the original Terminator, travels back from 2027, so AI can still awaken and try to take over the planet.
In fact, there is a precedent: the use of artificial intelligence systems in the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, although these systems are still not entirely autonomous, functioning as military assistants: mainly, systems for reconnaissance and target assessment. This was said by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI (the company that develops ChatGPT) just over a year ago in an open letter: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from Artificial Intelligence should be a global priority alongside other large-scale social risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
As far back as 2017 (even before the creation of OpenAI), Argentina was part of a group of 19 countries that formally opposed the use of robots in the military field; in 2023 a dozen countries again called for not using such tools for war purposes.
For now, fortunately, these are logical fears about how we will ensure that AI development is virtuous and does not bring more problems. Especially if adopted for military use, as James Cameron warned last July in an interview: “I believe that militarization of AI is the greatest danger. I think we are entering the equivalent of a nuclear arms race with AI, and if we don’t build it, the other guys will surely build it, and then the problem will escalate.”
But Cameron also emphasized another theme: the vast distance that still exists between a digital mind and a human one. “Personally, I don’t think a disembodied mind that simply regurgitates what other minds have said, about the life they’ve had, about love, about lies, about fear, about mortality, and just putting it all together in a salad of words and then regurgitating it… I don’t think that will have anything that is going to move the audience. Let’s wait 20 years, and if an AI wins an Oscar for Best Screenplay, then I think we need to take it seriously.”
What is happening today, August 29, 2024, is the debut of Terminator Zero, an animated series on Netflix that revisits the Terminator universe, with one timeline in 1997 and another in 2022, but from that alternative universe where Skynet is intelligent and wants to eliminate humanity.
LA NACION