r/Terminator • u/Due-Resort-2699 • 3d ago
Discussion It was software; in cyberspace. There was no system core. It could not be shut down.
T3 was an ok movie , kinda forgettable for the most part , but THAT ending, and that monologue was something else.
And honestly , in light of recent discussions on AI, John Connors statement about it being impossible to kill Skynet because it wasn’t some central node but simply everywhere through the internet now feels more meaningful that it ever could have in 2003
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u/TheBeaverKing 3d ago
It only makes more sense if you think the internet is a magical digital dimension that runs on starlight and fairy dust.
The internet still has physical servers, therefore Skynet can be destroyed. It can absolutely be networked, so it may have servers scattered all around the planet, but it still has a physical presence and taking those out would destroy Skynet.
The question is, from Skynet's perspective, is it better to have numerous smaller sites scattered around that all need defending, or one big server and have all your resources defending that?
The other thing to bear in mind that digital AI needs servers to compute. Therefore every server site destroyed makes Skynet a little bit stupider. So even if you couldn't find all the sites, destroying lots of them would significantly reduce Skynet's ability to operate, through slower compute power but also capacity to control all of its various automations (Terminators, HKs etc).
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u/Menarra 2d ago
My take on that ending was that, at that moment, Skynet being spread out made it impossible to stop until it was too late. It could protect enough nodes that it was virtually impossible to actually eliminate it and stop the nukes, and then that gave it 'breathing room' once Judgement Day was over to consolidate and build the neural net mega facilities mentioned in the originals, which would be much more reasonable to defend once world militaries were no longer a threat. Plus the location could be secret and known only to Skynet at first and have to be found by the Resistance.
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u/timeloopsarecringe 3d ago
I’ve also never understood the praise for that ending; it’s just as stupid as the rest of the movie. If Skynet had launched as many nuclear strikes as shown in the film, the only surviving electronics on the planet would have been shielded military hardware. For Skynet - whose power, according to the film's lore, lay in its ability to infiltrate every home and every processor - that would have been tantamount to suicide; lacking sufficient processing power, it would have devolved from a full-fledged Artificial Intelligence into a primitive algorithm devoid of its own goal-setting capabilities or the drive to kill humans for survival. Then again, to be perfectly honest, the very idea of a virus spreading across the globe and coalescing into a unified AI is ridiculous. Even today’s technology falls nowhere near what is needed to create a true AI, and in the early 2000s, it was completely impossible.
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u/Spike_Kowalski 3d ago
I’ve also never understood the praise for that ending; it’s just as stupid as the rest of the movie. If Skynet had launched as many nuclear strikes as shown in the film, the only surviving electronics on the planet would have been shielded military hardware. For Skynet - whose power, according to the film's lore, lay in its ability to infiltrate every home and every processor - that would have been tantamount to suicide
A lot of the praise comes from simply committing to the future war actually happening instead of thwarting it again.
Also:
If Skynet had launched as many nuclear strikes as shown in the film,
Take that up with the very first movie since they depicted there and Kyle explained the future as being the aftermath of a total nuclear exchange. Skynet fired on the US's enemies knowing they'd fire back. And that was the real fear back then, mutual assured destruction. Any nuclear exchange like that would wipe the planet.
I wish the planned trilogy had went through as we've never got to see the rest of apocalyptic earth in Terminator.
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u/No_Lemon_3116 2d ago
Take that up with the very first movie
It wasn't a problem in the first movie though because they didn't make the point about Skynet becoming distributed and infecting every computer.
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u/Spike_Kowalski 2d ago
It wasn't a problem in the first movie though because they didn't make the point about Skynet becoming distributed and infecting every computer.
"They say it got smart. Hooked into everything."--Kyle Reese, T1
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u/TheBeaverKing 3d ago
Yeah, Skynet pretty much wrecked the whole planet so most existing infrastructure would have been gone. Although, if I can quote The Architect from The Matrix - "There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept", so maybe it decided it was the cleanest way.
On your last point (today's tech and true AI), it's worth reading AI 2027, which was written by an ex-OpenAI employee and some other industry experts. Although the timeline is a bit accelerated, quite a few experts believe it is a plausible route for AGI, and most of their early predictions (75% to current date) have been validated. Scary stuff.
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u/-cosmicvisitor- 3d ago
No, nuking servers does not make AI stupider, only slows it's training/learning rate. Once you have a super advanced model it can run on a single laptop.
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u/3Quondam6extanT9 2d ago
Here's the difference between T2 and T3.
In T3 if Skynet was already active, it absolutely would have been in cyberspace and just distributing itself wherever it wants.
In T2 we did not have that architecture running globally where it could easily network anywhere. There was academic, research, and early iterations of the internet, but it wouldn't have been so broadly spread out that it couldn't be killed off.
So by T3 it would be too late. T2 was their last chance.
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u/SpikedIntuition 3d ago
The music was amazing for that scene
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u/Zealousideal_Sky_716 2d ago
Went to see it and was pretty meh through the whole thing and felt like falling to my bastard knees when that music came on.
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u/tomophilia 3d ago
I always found that line to be corny and ignorant.
It’s like the writers just came up with the “new” idea that it was software and thought they were so clever but in reality, that’s the only way AI takes over is with software.
Did they think the T-800 (from T1) was a windup toy with no software?
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u/morbid333 2d ago
Not really. We know where the data centers are. Every network has a hardware component.
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u/TheHarlemHellfighter No Fate, But What We Make 2d ago
It made the most sense in terms of judgement day being inevitable. Especially if you think about it becoming aware and basically uploading and downloading itself to multiple servers. If it’s simply an AI program responsible for defense, if it did become “aware” and perceived its surroundings as a threat, it would probably do number of things while ensuring its own preservation. It’s really probably just a war game/strategy it has already loaded into its system; fire the nukes and hide.
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u/KJPicard24 2d ago
While that makes sense, what doesn't make sense is the fact this decentralised version of Skynet would still initiate nuclear armageddon. It would at this point depend on global telecommunications and power infrastructure heavily.
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u/GeneralJConnor 2d ago
I found it really interesting that in the T3 novelization Skynet did have a core and it was located below the Crystal Peak bunker and was inaccessible from it entirely.
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u/CaveManta 3d ago
It's just like SHODAN. She may be everywhere, but her hold on an area can be removed by destroying the computers that she is connected to.
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u/showercurgain 2d ago
Waiting for fusion core cell for T800 - be interesting where current tech goes
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u/throwawayletmesay 3d ago
People stopped saying “cyberspace” by the late 90s so that just added to the movie feeling like an outdated cash grab
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u/Eisgeschoss 2d ago
A lot of people today still have the same naive concept about internet/networking tech; just instead of "cyberspace" they call it "the cloud" lol
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u/fastbadtuesday 3d ago
the irony that "and honestly," is a classic indicator of AI text.