With the sixth “Terminator” installment slated for release this November, one thought dawned on us: Has it really been 35 years since we were first introduced to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s characterization of a time-traveling T800 android? How time flies, no pun intended!
The dystopian story starts in the year 2029, where the global artificial intelligent Skynet sends back a T800 robot to 1984. In the next four “Terminator” installments, we were further introduced to upgraded and even shape-shifting androids that were faster, better, and stronger than T800.
Just for fun, let’s take a look at how today’s innovations stack up against “Terminator” technologies.
Cyborgs
Were the terminators cyborgs or androids?
In this post, we define cyborgs as those born human (or any living species) but were later enhanced with a combination of living tissues and metal endoskeletons. Androids, meanwhile, are artificially created but made in the physical likeness of humans.
So do we have real cyborgs in our midst? While many would find it uncool to be called cyborgs, we cannot discount the many cases where patients have lost limbs and were later fitted with robotic limbs through nerve-muscle grafting.
Bionic arms or legs can now be mind-controlled. Headway has been made to improve the prosthetics wearer’s ability to either manage a three-pound weight or gingerly hold an egg between his index finger and thumb.
Technology now allows even the color-blind—as in the case of Neil Harbisson—to “hear color” through an antenna mounted on the lower back of his skull. The antenna permits his brain to interpret frequencies of light into vibrations.
Androids
There are machines known for their practical and no-frills look such as Pegasus, Amazon’s stack-carrying mobile robot and there are those built with a little aesthetics in mind, especially if they are meant to resemble humans.
Sophia is the first nonhuman Innovation Ambassador for the United Nations Development Programme. In soft robotics, she is a “social humanoid” machine that boasts of 50 facial expressions. Her intelligence is nowhere near that of the terminators, but her machine perception allows her to identify emotional expressions and various hand gestures.
Through voice (enabled by natural language processing) and facial recognition technologies as well as artificial intelligence (AI), she can allegedly estimate a human’s feelings during a conversation. A chatbot software likely gives her the capability to deliver any of her preprogrammed scripts based on what the other party says.
Neural Networks
“Skynet has become self-aware,” so announced the reprogrammed T800 with a sense of foreboding in “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machine.”
The fictional Skynet is an artificial neural network. It has sensors everywhere connected to different computers. These connections can include those to military satellites, war weapons, and, of course, terminators.
In the movie, Skynet gained artificial general intelligence. Taking fiction one step further, it became self-aware, turning itself into the Darth Vader of all terminators.
Dystopian scenario aside, artificial neural networks today are used for pattern recognition or data classification. Take Google’s Quick Draw, for example, which can identify what one is trying to doodle, thanks to what it has learned from millions of samples in its doodling data set.
While the Skynet technologies gone bad is a worst-case scenario, artificial neural networks do have applications in the area of defense. In 2004, U.S. army personnel tested the early version of the Real-time Adversarial Intelligence and Decision-making (RAID) software to predict enemy forces’ actions, movements, and even emotions up to five hours into the future. In the simulated battles, RAID gave more accurate and faster decisions than the military planners, thanks to its game-theoretic and deception-sensitive algorithms.
Nanorobots
In “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machine,” T800’s nemesis is a female terminator, T-X. In one scene, we see her killing a woman whom she mistakenly thought was Kate Brewster, John O’Connor’s future wife.
To confirm if this was the human she was hunting down, she dips her silver ferrofluid-like fingers into the dead woman’s wound and turns herself into a mobile DNA test lab by tasting her blood.
We assume, of course, that this intelligent agent has Kate’s blood works records stored in her memory to compare with.
As an upgraded android, T-X can also remotely control other machines or fellow robots once she injects them with her supply of built-in nanobots then program them to hunt down her prey.
Today, the nanobots that T-X features in the movie are more fiction than fact.
The future of nanobots probably proves most promising in the field of medicine. Current experiments are focusing on how microscopic bots can rid the human body of bacteria and toxins. Others aim to develop cell-sized robots that can be sent down say, the digestive system, to collect data on chemical substances such as enzymes and hormones.
Researchers continue to address the risks and any unintended consequences as they try to make headway in nanotechnology and nanorobotics.
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For now, we can’t wait to find what other tech surprises the next movie, “Terminator: Dark Fate,” features.
Earlier, we asked if the terminators were cyborgs or androids? Since they were manufactured by the fictional Cyberdyne Systems (the same company that built Skynet), we deem terminators androids (although we are aware that the script calls them cyborgs).
Nonetheless, we realize that this question may be moot and academic. After all, in the movie’s view, terminators act based on how they were programmed. Like T800, the movie’s robots can potentially learn the ways of man, but it could take countless interactions with humans before they can feel and decide the way we do.
