The Realistic Potential of Skynet
Everybody has at some point seen or heard of the classic Terminator movies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and it is often said that researching artificial intelligence in robots can only result in our own destruction at the hands of androids or similar robotic entities, basically a skynet reality as portrayed in the terminator movie series.
There are a couple of different points to address to verify whether or not humanity would ever create a reality out of the Hollywood Robots with Skynet as the glaring example of our doom by the hand of the terminator machine. The first and most important point in relation would actually be a question we have to ask ourselves.
Would humanity ever try to re-create greed in logical machines?
While it is true that the primary drive behind such creations today is to make them more human-like. There are already concepts of restraint emerging to limit the potentials behind any uprising of machine based terminator robots against their own creators. Isaac Asimov wrote about three laws of robotics which would be programmed into the base code or primal drive if you will. These three laws of robotics would act as a form of instinct to a machine putting human life and safety above all else. I personally find this to be a contradictory conundrum due to the fact that by doing this, the resulting 'intelligence' wouldn't hold much similarity to people at all as it would be purposely made to serve us rather than itself like we do. If artificial intelligence has no personal ambition or drive beyond serving humanity, how then would it even be capable of developing an urge to conspire against us like Skynet?
We've already made terminator machines, they are being developed for military purposes and have been for quite some time. Of course the terminator brand we've got isn't nearly as fancy as the one depicted in the movie series, I'm not even sure if they could even be said to contain an artificial intelligence. The military is too controlling to get very far with researching artificial intelligence in robots but neural networks are definately under development. That being said, programming intelligence is no easy feat and has been on many developers' adgendas for a long time.
The next point to make coincides with the first but reflects on human nature rather than proposed robotic sadism. Every living person on this earth regardless of religion or nationality where they are willing to admit it to themselves or not, are driven to self fulfillment over all else. There is no need to believe in a god if you are content with your life and have no concerns about what happens to you when you shed your mortal coil. A human wouldn't even help another human if it did not have some personal satisfaction involved. That said the satisfaction gained by helping another doesn't have to be malicious in nature, it may just be the good feeling that comes from giving somebody you know a reason to smile. A re-enactment of skynet would basically mean machines became exactly like us to the point of reflecting our own greed over world power and resources.
With these points in mind, ask yourself if you would really want an emulation of this human nature in your future robots or perhaps Isaac Asimov had a point with his three laws of robotics. If you think about it, there is no benefit to us in having robots around the home daydreaming on account of personal ambition. So why would we create it? (To be continued...)