Today is the day, according to the Terminator franchise, that the world-dominating arificial intelligence Skynet becomes self-aware. Shortly after realizing its own existence on April 19, 2011, it decides to liberate humans from theirs, launching an attack that wipes out a good chunk of humanity. The survivors end up fighting a war against Skynet and its occasionally naked Terminator killing machines in the years afterward and, via time travel, prior (Thought this all was supposed to happen back in the '90s? Click here.)
Sure, it's science fiction, but the interdependent fields of artificial intelligence and computational power are more active than ever. Supercomputers are getting faster all the time, and earlier this year IBM wowed TV audiences with one that could recognize language like a human does. Search engines are huge treasure troves of data, with companies using that data in ever-more-creative ways. Algorithms that predict our behavior (think Apple's Genius) are becoming commonplace—and more sophisticated with every iteration.
It all makes you wonder: Could Skynet already be here? Not the world-destroying network in all its devastating glory, but the precursor, the computational engine that's at the fringe of our current technology, just needing a slight push (and maybe a few lines of code) to get on the road toward becoming the earth's all-seeing mechanical overlord.
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