|
Post by Derek Reese on Dec 28, 2008 21:25:44 GMT -5
Figured since the Turk is a character in it of itself and is constantly be upgarding. We should have a thread to discuss the character in its all its developing glory here.
Do you all believe this is the true source of Skynet in the series or a connection that leads nowhere?
|
|
|
Post by richardstevenhack on Dec 28, 2008 23:37:24 GMT -5
At the moment, it certainly seems like "John Henry" is to become the eventual Skynet. It would be just like Josh to let this die into a dead end, however. So I'd say we can't tell for sure, but for now it looks like it.
What interests me is that they're really treating this as a MacGuffin. There's absolutely zero explanation of how "The Turk" was so quickly integrated into whatever AI systems Zeira Corp was already developing, or how "The Turk" acquired such a massive conceptual database almost overnight.
There is an AI project called the CYC Project which is a compendium of common sense knowledge expressed as logical rules intended to aid AI programs in dealing with the real world. Cycorp, Inc., in Austin, Texas, (coincidentally where the pilot was filmed, I believe) is in charge of that project, run by Doug Lenat. If "The Turk", with its presumably already developed conceptual processing algorithms developed by Andy Goode and possibly refined by the professional AI team at Zeira Corp., were to integrated with this database, it might explain how "John Henry" can function so well even at this point.
I wonder if the intent of the writers, given Ellison's reaction to his pastor's question about his aborted child, is to have Ellison try to be John Henry's "father", and then have John Henry kill him (or have Ellison try to destroy him), thus causing the AI to go insane. There's a lot of play there to create Skynet as a result of basically human family situations, as the opposite of the Connor family relations.
The byplay between Weaver and Ellison, with Ellison the divorced man and Weaver the (violently) divorced woman, and John Henry as the "battered child" raised by dysfunctional parents who eventually have to try to kill each other, obviously screams for recognition, as well.
|
|
|
Post by potomac79 on Dec 29, 2008 23:24:11 GMT -5
Me...I still hold to the romantic notion that the Turk is what leads to Cameron and her ilk, and is something like an experimental "dead end" that got resurrected post-JD. I think the Japanese team that won the chess tournament, the team that has been totally ignored by the Connors, is actually the one that lays the foundation for Skynet.
Of course, this line of thinking wanders into the thought that Catherine isn't trying to secure Skynet's invention, but Cameron's. After all, it's never been said on whose side she's fighting.
|
|
|
Post by richardstevenhack on Dec 30, 2008 7:18:00 GMT -5
I don't buy that there's a "Cameron faction" of the Terminators who want peace. That was just a story she handed Allison Young.
OTOH, if you mean that "The Turk" is intended to produce a superior sort of Terminator similar to Cameron, then you could be right. But there's nothing to indicate that so far. It's more likely that Skynet developed Cameron by itself after the war started to go bad.
And Catherine Weaver is certainly working directly for Skynet. Her mission seems clearly to be one of concentrating on insuring that Skynet gets created.
Whether she will succeed or not, and thus require another approach if she fails, is another question.
It is true that Sarah was dismissive of the Japanese team for no good reason, which fits in with the level of screwing up she's demonstrated all along. After all, later she got Derek himself from the Skynet hunting party, and she even admitted she'd gone through the files his team had collected and she still understand more than a third of it - which is fairly pathetic, since Derek could have told her what they were collecting and why. There's no evidence that Derek or his team had any particular knowledge of what they were looking for - they were simply gathering any intel they could. Therefore the fact that the Japanese team weren't in hs files is basically irrelevant.
The real problem of course is that there are plenty of AI research projects running around the world. If the Connors start worrying about all of them, good luck with that. They need to concentrate on the ones related to Cyberdyne, and more importantly, any that seem to have decent funding and possibly a connection to the military.
It's quite likely that only ONE AI project actually has the opportunity to become Skynet, given the requirements: 1) conceptual processing that works, 2) funding, 3) emotional development, and 4) military connections or the ability to access military networks.
Right now, Weaver and Zeira Corp are the number one suspects.
|
|
|
Post by potomac79 on Dec 30, 2008 19:19:10 GMT -5
The thing that makes this squirrelly for me is that we have no idea what Cat's agenda is. Is she rogue? Is she working for Skynet? We only have assumptions.
Even so, in regards to the Turk...Cat seems to be intent on ensuring that if the Turk does become Skynet, that it isn't the same ol' Skynet that spawned her. Ignoring causality loops, it seems that Skynet was more than capable of being uber-fearful and human-nuking all on its own without any theological meddling. So why do it?
The post-JD war isn't just costly to humans, but to Skynet as well. T1 was because the humans had won and Skynet was trying to cheat its way out of it. But...what if the computer that becomes Skynet (for this argument, let's say it's the Turk) gains enough insight that it can prevent the situation of the humans wanting to pull the plug in the first place? In order to do that, Skynet needs to have enough patience and a lessened megalomaniacal bent. If some compassion for humans can be ingrained, then they can be conquered not through force of arms, but through dependence. Energy plants aren't destroyed, material supplies aren't disrupted, and growth isn't impeded by a nuisance war.
The Turk is meant for something other than simply being a paranoid supercomputer with a hair-trigger. The question is...what?
Perhaps the only goal is to give it a leg-up, much like the Connors are trying to achieve (or..rather..should be trying to achieve). Imagine if Skynet is able to come out with a T-Cameron model first...bypassing the T6xx and T8xx series. Or...perhaps imbue a T-Cameron-like personality matrix onto a T100x series...not in twenty years but in ten, or even fifteen. Wouldn't that be enough of an advantage to thwart the humans?
From it's progress in developing a nascent sense of humor, the evidence implies that it might be headed in a direction different from the Skynet CPU developed by the late-Cyberdyne systems.
There just isn't enough information to know where, exactly, ZeiraCorp fits into the process. How connected are they to the military, if at all? If there was a big cybernetics outfit in the middle of L.A. (especially one that owns the building), you'd think that even the Connors would have noticed it.
The faction bit is still ambiguous until we get on-screen corroboration. Unfortunately, most of the "information" we are dealing with is in dire need of on-screen corroboration. We're going on a lot of guesses and choosing who/what to believe.
|
|
|
Post by richardstevenhack on Dec 31, 2008 14:31:08 GMT -5
I was watching the episode about the "gray", Charles Fischer, again last night.
Once again, his job was to insert a "roving backdoor" into a number of military and commercial computer systems. That implies that Skynet, wherever it is created, will have access to those systems. So it's likely that whether or not Zeira Corp gets military contracts for their AI - and the odds are they definitely would - Skynet will be able to gain control of those nukes. This might be a setup for eliminating the T-2 and T-3 concepts where Skynet had to be a military project and had to operate flying Air Force bombers for a couple years.
I think the problem with us knowing where Weaver and her Skynet prototype fits in is that the writers themselves don't know. They haven't decided where to take this, except maybe in a some broad overall concept.
Presumably, while Weaver seems to be feeling her way in creating Skynet, there is some more specific plan for John Henry. One can't help but feel that Ellison and his religious indoctrination is in fact precisely what produces the megalomaniacal and paranoid AI that Skynet is supposed to be.
I don't think the writers intend to actually create Skynet early on. I suspect that part of the series will be dragged out over seasons three and beyond, assuming they get them. Right now, Zeira barely has something that works. Getting it up to the point where the military wants to embed it in their Air Force planes (per T-2), and then those planes fly for a couple years with a perfect operational record - assuming the series adheres to that time line - leaves plenty of room for the series to delay creating the final Skynet that starts Judgment Day.
I'd like to see the Connors have to graduate from just dealing with one company and its T-1001 CEO to having to deal with a huge government project being guarded by serious security, having to deal with compromised government officials and paranoid government security men chasing them, and perhaps foreign agents trying to hijack or infect the program with their own malevolent AIs, etc.
I'm amused by people complaining that finding "The Turk" too soon wouldn't allow for good stories, but apparently accelerating the creation of Skynet, as the writers seem to be doing does. I can't see how that follows. The creation of Skynet should be a long term project that takes several seasons to complete. And even then, the sparring between the Connors and Skynet can go on for a while before it actually acquires the ability to do Judgment Day.
The problem is that in reality a superintelligent AI would take over very quickly - probably in a matter of hours, like they showed in T-3. And if the AI was really superintelligent - not just as intelligent as humans - it would beat John Connor before lunch. The movie "The Forbin Project" pretty much showed what would be likely to happen.
So maybe the goal here is to create a Skynet which is not much more intelligent than humans and is hobbled by the same emotional problems humans are afflicted with. That would fit in with the way John Henry is being characterized.
|
|
|
Post by vicheron on Jan 1, 2009 0:13:38 GMT -5
There is still the question of whether or not they have the hardware required for the creation of something like Skynet. John Henry's hardware is clearly far more advanced than anything we have today. It's like jumping from a dog's brain to an elephant's brain. However, John Henry may still need a hardware upgrade in order to reach a kind of intellect superior to that of humans.
|
|
|
Post by richardstevenhack on Jan 2, 2009 7:26:53 GMT -5
It's not clear to me that Skynet will ever have an intellect superior to humans. If it did, it probably would never be defeated even by John Connor. I suspect that will be Skynet's biggest Achilles heel - that it never got smarter than a human, even though it has access to massive amounts of data and can process it better than a human.
I think Skynet probably could get by with the server farm Zeira Corp can produce for the moment, IF it has the ability to hack and distribute itself over other systems via the Net, and can find a way into the MILNET network, the secure military network which is not directly connected to the Internet. That's the only way it will get access to nuclear weapons unless it is directly inserted into the MILNET system by the Pentagon at some point.
That was a very big server farm they showed Ellison walking through in his warm coat. Probably thousands of rack-mounted systems, each with multiple processors, and terabytes of disk space, and specialized hardware like huge SSD's (Solid State Drives). A major computer company would have all that.
We don't know how big Zeira Corp is, but it's probably smaller than Google. But if Skynet got access to Google's systems clandestinely, it would have all the power it needs to hack any other network on the planet. Google has an estimated 500,000 servers under its control in its data centers.
I saw a "mobile data center" at the Linux show here in San Francisco last August. It was built in a container. Google and other outfits are starting to produce these. There's room in there for quite a few processors. The Rackable Systems ICE Cube mobile data center can hold up to 2800 independent servers per container—for up to 22,400 cores in a 40' x 8' container. For storage-focused deployments, the ICE Cube is capable of housing up to 7.1 Petabytes of data.
More than enough to get Skynet functioning nicely, I'd say - considering that Andy Goode managed to produce a conceptual processing program with just some basic PC and game console components.
|
|
|
Post by bowman on Jan 2, 2009 8:42:56 GMT -5
The hardware issue is minor. The only hurdle they face is to shrink a huge cluster into a chip the size of a domino piece. Moore's Law will take care of that as time goes by.
Software is the biggest problem, and apparently The Turk is pretty much there. But that's just from what we can see. It might just be that it seems intelligent, like those Turing Challenge programs, yet it isn't.
|
|
|
Post by richardstevenhack on Jan 2, 2009 20:08:12 GMT -5
For Skynet, they don't have to shrink the size of the computer. Presumably Skynet is not mobile - although it would be interesting if it were. Skynet merely needs to be in a computing system which is either hardened or distributed, to insure its security. Zeira Corp wouldn't be either, but as a base from which to begin achieving a distributed architecture, it would be adequate. And once it distributes itself into various government hardened computer facilities, such as Cheyenne Mountain, it would be reasonably secure from attack - especially once it controls all the nukes.
To create Terminators, however, with at least a significant fraction of the processing power of Skynet, they would need to create the chip capability shown. However, presumably Skynet itself is capable for doing that design once it's created.
There is a bit of "chicken and egg" problem there, though. Initially Skynet is just a program. It needs to obtain control of either some humans or some robotics manufacturing facilities in order to produce the initial Terminators. T-3 almost addressed that, with the robotic gun platforms. But those platforms weren't capable of constructing anything. So how did the first Terminator factory get built? Either captured humans did it, or Skynet had to get control of a robotics factory somewhere and redesign it for its own use. Maybe T-4 will address that, since supposedly there are scenes with John Connor in a Terminator factory.
I think The Turk is capable of true conceptual processing at this point, more so than the Turing Challenge programs. Otherwise, Weaver wouldn't waste her time with it. But clearly it doesn't yet have Skynet's intentions or goals. How it gets those is the big question - and I suspect Ellison is the answer somehow. That guy is really riding for a fall!
|
|
|
Post by vicheron on Jan 9, 2009 23:12:43 GMT -5
The fact that they're destroying all the Terminators suggests that they're following T2's premise, which implies that the chip is very important. That was why Uncle Bob sacrificed himself in the end.
|
|
|
Post by bowman on Jan 10, 2009 8:34:24 GMT -5
Well, yeah, if someone got a hold of the chip and reverse-engineered it it would alter the course of technological evolution (as Cam explained), it would happen faster. But even if they do destroy them all it is inevitable that it will be possible to mass-produce processors as powerful and as small as the Cyberdyne chip.
The concept might even be that the chip is an entire system-on-a-chip, including storage (unlike current computers where nearly everything is separate), hence reverse engineering them would reveal tidbits about the software which is the true crown jewel, the AI behind them.
|
|