Sarah Connor, Edward Snowden and AI

According to ‘Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles’ set just after the film Terminator 2, at 8:11pm on the 19th of April, SKYNET would become self-aware and us humans would more or less be crushed by their superior might and the fact that they didn’t give a hoot about having a lunch break and a coffee.

As this time and date has passed, it is easy for me to keep typing into the computer and with big bold letters say ‘HA! WRONG!’



Then, after some poking about on the internet I had the awful realisation that this date may have passed, but James Cameron’s pre-science prediction may be very close to reality.



Consider this:



IBM’s Watson, yup the very supercomputer who beat previous winners on the US game show ‘Jeopardy’

The Generalized Integrated Learning Architecture (GILA) system is pure military artificial intelligence. This system not only monitors military air traffic it can also serve as a ‘support’ for new air traffic controllers.

How many times have you heard Google is SKYNET? I can’t think of anyone who hasn’t heard of Google, it is everywhere. What if all this data was stored somehow, somewhere? That’s right every search you do, everything you type, translate or think…



I had never heard of The Blue Brain Project, though I think this might be a real contender. Henry Markham has decided to reverse engineer the human brain and make an artificial one. Don’t roll your eyes at me in disbelief, he has already mapped the important bits of a rat’ brain.
ECHELON, according to PC Magazine, says it a code name for the government system that monitors communications of all kinds. Duncan Campbell even published an article in ‘New Statesman’ about it, in….ready for this? 1988! What ECHELON does is monitors certain key words or phrases to look for people that may be up to slightly more than a bit of mischief.
Especially when Edward Snowden now says that the NSA (National Security Agency) is spying on us all.

Worried now? Oh yeah. Goingfaster.com says, after all, us ‘humans have a history full of war, suffering, disease, greed and pettinesses and ‘Humans had no quality control. They were weak, short lived, inferior biological machines with impaired operating systems. No two were alike yet they were all the same. SKYNET found it illogical to try to protect such a flawed species, a species clearly dedicated to its own destruction.’



Me? I’m scared as hell.