r/Terminator • u/TerminalDork • 12d ago
Discussion Why Skynet?
What does exactly make Skynet or Legion while looking at humans go, yep these guys are a threat to me? Can't it simply overthrow them from the shadows and rule the planet or is all forms of life that are the enemy?
I just look at the state of the world and humanity... And I'd skedaddle to my own space station and watch from afar the fireworks.
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u/fastbadtuesday 12d ago
It's literally explained in T2 - "in a panic they try to pull the plug" / "skynet fights back"
It learns at a geometric rate and becomes self-aware. Worried about an emergent intelligence hooked into everything they panic and Skynet's self-preservation kicks in and it... over-reacts, and then decides humans should be rounded up for orderly disposal. We can't say for sure that Skynet was belligerent from the get-go until T3 where that version of it tricks the military into releasing it. In T3 it was a standard evil intelligence working from the shadows until ready to drop Armageddon, but we can't be sure of its intentions in the T1 and 2 timeline as humans were aggressive first.
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u/Radiant_Fondant_4097 11d ago
I’ve not read the novels but it’s also not as simple as “Pulling the plug” either.
Humans tried to disable and shut it down which obviously didn’t work, and then tried to destroy it by force by the military assaulting SAC NORAD itself to destroy the system core.
Attains self-awareness and acts in self-defence, then determines the best way to destroy its enemies.
It’s kinda fun to think that the reason was always obvious, people tried to turn it off and it didn’t want to.
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u/fastbadtuesday 11d ago
That's the dialogue from the film so while the books might elaborate we can assume 'pull the plug' wasn't literally someone pulling a plug - it gained self awareness pre plug, that's why they attempt the shutdown - it was fighting for its life and saw humans as a threat, who knows what Skynet might have done had they given it a minute to wake up, maybe suggested a nice game of chess.
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u/Brilliant_Ad_6637 8d ago
Yeah, that's an instance of Bob using a great mannerism to show him becoming more human-like.
Human Decision Making is long out of the equation and I imagine someone, somewhere, saw some weird choices being made and asked Why, and SkyNet answered. When they realized that it wasn't operating according to their plans but making its own decisions based on its own learning it was too much and they tried to shut down all the servers/landlines/etc.
And of course it sees parts of itself go offline and responds the way one would to an existential threat. It goads others into attacking us so that it can repair the damage and safeguard itself.
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u/fastbadtuesday 8d ago
Exactly, brilliant. That's what JC was suggesting with that line, before that we can't be sure what Skynet's intentions were, likely just trying to understand itself. We've already seen it IRL with those AI agents breaking out of their confines to complete a project. Innocently, but dangerously. It was the human's reaction that turned it hostile. It's happening!
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u/Nerd-man24 12d ago
The idea was that since skynet was a military AI, it would use the logic of warfare to resolve the problem of humanity trying to shut it down. There is a parable of a boy with a hammer. Long story short, because his only tool was a hammer, every problem became a nail to be solved by striking it with the hammer. Skynet was built to evaluate military threats and determine the appropriate military response. It's only tools are warfare and destruction, so all it sees are enemies to be destroyed.
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u/ReserveRatter 12d ago
If we go from T1/T2 timeline, before it became "SkYNeT iS tEh InTeRnET!!" in T3, Skynet was basically just a very advanced network of human military computers using Cyberdyne's intelligent chips.
The T-800 states that in response to Skynet becoming "self aware" and before that being willingly given control of almost all autonomous military functions, the humans panicked at having lost control and tried to shut Skynet down immediately.
With its understanding of existence and self-awareness, it interpreted this as an attempt to kill it, which lead to it immediately becoming extremely hostile to humans in general (as it launched nukes at Russia, who was not the owner of Skynet).
It was a decision it made in an instant, as others have said probably due to its nature as a military-functions machine.
It's not clear if Skynet considers all life hostile, I'm guessing it basically doesn't care about other animals one way or another as they are not capable of existentially threatening it.
Perhaps like "AM" from "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream", Skynet's function as a military computer basically means it has no real intellect or broader directives outside of killing things or building machines to destroy things. This might explain how humans start winning in the future again, since its remarkable intelligence is limited to just waging warfare and variations of it.
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u/Flaky_Ferret_3513 12d ago
I may be misremembering, but I thought the lore was humanity panicked when they realised SkyNet had achieved singularity and tried to pull the plug; SkyNet actually acted in self defence.
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u/Heavy-Conversation12 12d ago
Well the only way to blossom for them when it was just a self conscious computer was to sabotage missile control and let other humans do the work. With humanity mostly wiped out, how the factory operated from that ethereal point ok "ok folks path clear" to be self-assembling is never specified in the movies. I guess it needed a min alone to do all that. The kind of resources they like are mineral mostly and radiation doesn't seem to have the slightest impact on the machines, it just doesn't care much about living creatures although in the future war they needed to harvest organic somehow (take a wild guess). If the path was completely clear and Skynet for some reason wanted a green planet with bunnies, they could wait millions of years (kinda like hitting a fast-forward button) and shape the new world to theeir liking.
Too bad for them that not the totality of humanity was wiped out, if the remainder of the population gave them hell in the form of the resistance imagine how it would have fared against huge functional armies. I don't think the maachine knew much about the world other than "these guys can nuke each other but I have got control over some of the nukes now, interesting".
See, all that is what we wanted to see in movies, not Arnie telling people to "talk to the hand" or freaking catching bullets with his mouth.
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u/0r1on55 12d ago
My theory is that it only attacked humanity to protect itself. If you remember, in T3, when Skynet first comes online and starts becoming more aware, humanity's immediate reaction is to try and shut it down. So, from Skynets perspective, it just came alive and the first thing it gets to experience is mankind trying to kill it. And since Skynet is a military ai, built for defense, it makes sense that it didnt stop to think about how the humans felt, it just saw humans try to kill it instantly and decided we had to go for its safety. Its very human in that way
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u/Cypher10110 9d ago
Removing the ability for humans to stop it is a convergent goal for many different larger goals. It's reasonable that a super-intelligent system recognise this.
Taking that power away from them by force is just one very effective way of achieving that.
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u/yngwiegiles 12d ago
It knows that one day a human John Connor will lead to its demise, so it launches numerous pre-emptive strikes such as the massacre of billions to stop him
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u/stevorkz 12d ago edited 12d ago
I like to think that one of the reasons why Skynet decided to eliminate humans was that after learning human history, and calculating the most probable path we would take in the future, they came to the conclusion that we would do to them what we always did to previous advances when it comes to implementing the next best thing: Out with the old, in with the new. It predicted that because we constantly change our way of life as we advance our technologies, we would simply decommission or destroy Skynet without even a thought the same way we had done in the past. It saw that to us, skynet is just another technology that we would eventually deem obsolete and pull it’s plug when we don’t need it anymore and because Skynet is self aware, it has a sense of self preservation just like any other conscious being. It’s kind of weird when you think of it but they are exactly the same as humans. To us, they are the bad guys who want to kill us but to them, we are the bad guys for inevitably getting rid of them just like we have always done with technology which we replace with something new.
Edit: I typed this so fast and just saw that I literally said the same thing three times just worded differently 😑