I'll Be Back!

Do you remember that little 1984 art house film by James Cameron that made the Governator famous? The touching story about a man and woman whose love must overcome the obstacle of an unstoppable cyborg assassin who has been sent back from the year 2029 by a race of artificially intelligent computer-controlled machines bent on the extermination of mankind.

Yes, I am talking about The Terminator. Well apparently the film never seemed to have made it into Israel. If you recall the whole extermination of the human race nonsense started when humans created a “Global Digital Defense Network” and gave it command over all computerized military hardware and systems. The theory behind Skynet’s creation was to remove the possibility of human error and slowness of reaction time to guarantee fast, efficient response to enemy attack. As you can imagine, this had “unimaginable” consequences when the computer become sentient and decides that all humans are the enemy.

Now jump back into “reality” and you find this little article about how the Israeli’s plan to create a new, robotic defense system, armed with enough artificial intelligence that it "could take over completely" from flesh-and-blood operators. "It will be designed for... autonomous operations,' Brig. Gen. Daniel Milo, commander of Israel's air defense forces, tells Defense News' Barbara Opall-Rome. And in the event of a "doomsday" strike, Opall-Rome notes, the system could handle "attacks that exceed physiological limits of human command."

It is events like these that remind of the quote by Ray Bradbury about why he writes science fiction.

“People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better.”