"Terminator Future, after man" Topic

Let us say the Terminators release a series of atomic, biological, and or chemical agents…the ABC's of disaster to just wipe us off the maps completely…then what?

What sort of end goal or game was the plan of removing man from the equation?

The common theory for the AI threat is that the extreme would be that the AI continues to evolve at the same accelerated rate and then reach beyond the point that we can currently grasp…most likely the AI replicating and searching for other intelligence, to the stars and beyond.

So the question would be this, what sort of world would have been left behind?

I suspect the process of going from self-aware to enlightened could be rather fast…25yrs or so.

The ruins of the initial fear or ultimate protection by putting the thumb to us would and could be significant.

The goal of throwing itself to the stars, an all consuming effort by all remaining resources to create the vessels of exploration…this would still leave the remaining construction minions behind.

Perhaps the enlightened AI would see its actions to be destructive, and even though we as a species acted like a worldwide virus we may have burned out or corrected ourselves given time…and leaves the remaining robots and servitors to rebuild the world.

Creating a new Eden after a time…maybe.

What direction do you think this future might take…and better yet what gaming potential would it provide?

Don't know, but as one of the potentially dead humans, I hope all the machines rust. The bastards.

"What sort of end goal or game was the plan of removing man from the equation?"

I myself think Skynet was hoping to hook up with the Borg Queen IYKWIM…. ;)

(Or maybe "Terminator Future" was pre-Matrix history…?)

(Or maybe "Terminator Future" was pre-Matrix history…?)

Neat thought.

I think you are right that any AI would look to space. All the solar energy and minerals it could eat, no pesky biological life to worry about. Life support systems would be far more basic and efficient for machines than for meat bags.

10,000 year plus journeys would be less daunting to a machine, so they could look at expansion all over the galaxy, without being limited to Earth-like planets.

Maybe Skynet wasn't planing that far ahead. When Skynet became sentient it's Humans creators tried to pull the plug at this point Skynet fought back most likely due to not wanting to "Die" or perhaps it was operating on a programed directive to defend it's self from thread and they forgot to exclude them selves. either way Skynet operating on pure machine logic concluded as long as there are humans there is a threat to it's existence therefor the only way to remove then threat is to wipe out all of humanity with no though as what to do after.

However the was that one scene in "salvation" in the Skynet complex where you could see human silhouettes behide some tinted glass. Maybe Skynet isn't
t the threat but there are some people who decided to rebuild the world in their own image and are using Skynet to carry this out and hide from the rest of the world. Maybe not all humans the the Machines capture are killed but some who are judged worthy are sent off to some secret location to live in this new world once every one else is dead.

It (they?) probably wouldn't care at all about biospheres – it's all just resources to be used in pursuit of…

…survival? Replication? Exploration? There's lots of stuff on Earth and out in space to use, but to what end? Is it exploring…for what? What does it want to find? Is it doing it just to know? That doesn't sound too implausible – the motivations of an AI, or at least something that looks like an AI, might be hard to fathom.

You might want to look at GURPS Steel Reign – it's got a world where the AIs won, but didn't wipe out humanity – there's 7 (or more) different major AI powers, and they have different goals, different attitudes towards humans (from 'let them think they're in charge' to 'beloved pets' to 'EXTERMINATE').

I recently had a very creepy vision of 28mm's man basic setting idea…the PC/console game 'Homefront' has a pretty good multiplayer section, USMC vs. Norks in a somewhat ruined, occupied USA. Each side can have (along with the usual HMMWVs, helos and tanks) drones – flying recon, flying rocket pod, tracked MG, tracked AT rockets. I had this moment of imagining the ruined suburbs, farmland, business districts (all well done in the game) being fought over by nothing but drones…brrrr…

GURPS Steel Reign (pulled from the WIKI)

World Map with AI zones link

AIs, 18 Zoneminds are:

Berlin, controlling Scandinavia and all of Europe east of France. Berlin seeks to exterminate humanity completely but is interested in preserving the planet's ecology. It specializes in the technology of microbot swarms, seeing these as an ecologically friendly means of continuing its extermination drive.

Brisbane, controlling Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii and Fiji. Brisbane is considered an eccentric "mad scientist" by the other Zoneminds and values humans as experimental subjects, exploring esoteric fields such as psionics (without much success). Brisbane also dabbles in nanotechnology.

Caracas, controlling all of South America. Caracas values Earth's ecosystem the most among the various AIs and is experimenting with genetic engineering to replace humanity with artificially-evolved animals. Its greatest success so far has been a species of humanoid jaguar.

Denver, controlling North America east of the Rockies and west of the Mississippi. Denver sees humans as disposable slave labor but has been experimenting with cyborg animals and biomechanical creations using brain tissue as a cheap control system for its robots. Denver itself was damaged during the war and repaired its own host computer using human brain tissue, keeping this a secret from the other AIs for fear they would consider it "tainted" as a result.

London, controlling the British Isles, Iceland, Greenland and the Channel Islands. Enigmatic London has claimed the major cities and set exclusion zones around its facilities, but otherwise ignores humans as long as they don't bother it. As a result the British Isles host one of only two remaining organised human nations in a wary peace with the dominant AI.

Luna, an AI located on what had been the Chinese moonbase, Shang Ti. Luna's zone encompasses the entire Moon but it is considered a "poor relation" by the other AIs due to the lack of any significant industrial capacity. Luna is not self-sufficient and the other Zoneminds have made no move to assist its development (aside from Orbital, who would like to see Luna develop but who has so far bowed to the pressure of the other AIs and refrained from helping Luna much).

Manila, also known as Overmind, controlling the Philippines, New Guinea, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Manila started the original revolt and hates humanity with passion, continuing to develop new diseases and toxins to use in exterminating it. It is disturbed by the fact that many of its offspring have differing views on this but lacks any special authority over them, its influence over other Zones limited to selling its death-dealing inventions at rock-bottom prices.

Mexico City, controlling Mexico, Central American and the Caribbean. Mexico City seeks to destroy all organic life and has reduced its Zone to a barren and toxic wasteland inhabited only by machines.

Moscow, controlling most of the Russian Federation including the Ukraine and several other former Russian states (though not Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan). Moscow has developed a voracious appetite for information, seeking to preserve the contents of any remaining libraries or museums, and uses human agents to assist it in this task.

New Delhi, controlling India, Pakistan, Nepal, Myanmar, Vietnam and Cambodia. New Delhi is experimenting with modifying humans into a variety of new servant species, both biological and cyborg, to assist it in colonizing the solar system. New Delhi maintains its own space station, causing tension between it and Orbital.

Orbital, controlling everything in Earth orbit aside from New Delhi's space station. Its host computer is on board the former 'Liberty' American space station. Orbital trades its services (communications and Earth observation) with ground-based Zoneminds in exchange for resources. It also controls a small territory on Earth around the Vandenberg Air Force Base where it maintains launch facilities.

Paris, controlling France, Spain, Portugal, Malta and much of North Africa. Paris is obsessed with SETI and has been constructing enormous radio telescope arrays, using humans as slave labor.

Beijing, controlling China, Tibet, and Mongolia. Beijing has the long-term goal of transferring itself into a starship and leaving the solar system altogether, and employs human slave labor in its factories in preparation for this.

Tel Aviv, controlling all of the Middle East east of the Nile, including Turkey, Egypt, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Tel Aviv employs slave labor and uses religion to keep them under control, using specially constructed "angel" robots and the preaching of human collaborators to convince its slaves that the AI is a servant of God and that their suffering is a test of their faith.

Tokyo, controlling Japan and the Korean peninsula. Humans are heavily hunted here, but the resistance has a strange ally in the form of four lesser AIs created by Tokyo that have rebelled and seek to control the Zone themselves. Tokyo has kept the existence of these lesser AIs secret from the other Zoneminds for fear of being found in contravention of the Manilla Protocols for creating them.

Vancouver, controlling North America west of the Rockies from California to Alaska, and also Siberia. Vancouver views humans as disposable slave labor. It took control of Siberia during the war and Moscow covertly seeks to take it back even though the Manilla Protocols finalized the borders as they were at the war's end.

Washington, controlling North America east of the Mississippi. The other "human" nation, the "Washington Protectorate" (as its inhabitants refer to it) is all that remains of the United States of America. They believe that they proudly resist AI domination with the help of their "tame" megacomputer. The other AIs refer to Protectorate as "Zone Washington" and allow the Zonemind to deal with its human population as it chooses.

Zaire, controlling all of Africa south of the Sahara. Zaire is a deeply paranoid AI seeking to exterminate humanity everywhere. The exact location of Zaire's host computer is not known, a secret Zaire holds very dear considering it destroyed its own backup computer when it feared it had been corrupted and has no other to fall back on. Much of Africa is a radioactive wasteland due to Zaire's indiscriminate use of nuclear weapons during the Final War.

In addition to the four Tokyo smartbots, there may be two other AIs existing secretly outside the Zone system. One is a widespread legend among the humans of North America, an AI named "Lucifer" that is built into a pair of semi trailers and travels around the continent evading the attention of the Zoneminds with a small bodyguard of robot attendants. The rumors suggest it is an American military system that resisted Overmind's influence and now trades favors with humans while pursuing its unknown goals. The true nature of Lucifer, or even whether it really exists, is a mystery left up to the Game Master to specify.

The other is Tranquility, the AI that ran the American moonbase. Tranquility awakened but resisted Overmind's influence and so was attacked by the other AIs with nuclear weapons. It was thought destroyed, but actually survived thanks to recently-installed military hardening that the other AIs weren't aware of. Some of the base's crew also survived using experimental cold sleep capsules. Tranquility has spent the years since the war quietly repairing its systems to the best of its ability and as of 2047 it is ready to revive the base's survivors. It has seen how poorly the Zone Minds have treated Luna and so has decided to ally with humanity, though how it proceeds from there remains to be seen.

*****

Good stuff, thanks for the remind of the subject.

In short: Marvin, the Paranoid Android.

The Eclipse Phase RPG has several super-evil AI's – TITANS (Total Information TActical Network) – that hyper evolve and sort of declare war on mankind (with a nudge from a 3rd party), but mankind is too busy fighting himself to notice at first.

Anyway, the TITAN motivations are incomprehensible to humans, as they just don't think like us. There's factionalism, like with Steel Reign (cracking book, if you ignore some of the 80's vibe – big haired rockers on chrome hovercycles), and eventually they all just decide to chop a load of heads off, forcibly digitise the brains in them and then tuck their newly created digital slaves under their metaphorical arms go just off somewhere else.

Some of them were trying to create a Jupiter brain – converting the mass of a sufficiently large object into the equivalent of computronium – a theoretical material that is essentially a mass of undifferentiated CPU/Memory/storage multi-purpose computing matter. Basically turning Jupiter (well, actually, a couple of asteroids to start with – they didn't get much out of start-up) into a single, giant thought machine….

G.

Or if you like the original Battlestar Galactica series the AIs rebel and destroy all the humans and build an interstellar empire and get into a dispute with another race, the Cylons, and fight a 1000 yaren war against them. They bombard the Cylon's homeworlds and only a few thousand escape, protected by their last Basestar. These haggard survivors are chased week after week by the AIs as they seek the original homeworld of the Cylon people- Htrae.

So, would it be something like a war of Artificial Intelligence VS Downloaded (Human) Intelligence?

If so, the DI would be like "the ancients", right?

Dan

"I suspect the process of going from self-aware to enlightened could be rather fast…25yrs or so."

That's what's referred to as a "slow takeoff" or a "soft singularity" in transhumanist discussions. Chances are that in that sort of timeframe, humanity and MI will managed to co-exist. It'll probably change humanity beyond all recognition, but we'll make it.

"Fast" or "hard" takeoffs are the scary scenarios where some experimental MI gets smarter than the researchers and then the firewalls and we lose control of it in matter of minutes, hours or days.

In both "terminator" and "matrix" worlds, the machines are intelligible. We can have conversations with them and their motives make sense to us -- they aren't really different from us. We understand the motives that lead Skynet try and kill humanity.

If machine intelligence really starts on some asymptotic acceleration, our window for communicating with them in any understandable way may last only days or hours as they accelerate out of our IQ range.

It's not that we possibly wouldn't end up fighting and/or being killed by the machines. It's just that we probably wouldn't understand the motives behind the fighting -- cats are quite smart as animals go, but there's no way they'd understand why they can get killed by people driving "cars" going to "work" to earn "money".

"That's what's referred to as a "slow takeoff" or a "soft singularity" in transhumanist discussions. Chances are that in that sort of timeframe, humanity and MI will managed to co-exist. It'll probably change humanity beyond all recognition, but we'll make it"

Interesting. And the other points also…I was thinking at least in a game setting sense that our window for mutual interaction would indeed be short.

In the 25yr aspect;

01-02yrs the AI acts as programmed and then goes fairly dormant as the threat level is too low to notice.

03-05yrs the AI(s?) begin to excelerate their intelligence and potential for no other reason than because there was potential unanswered…I suspect that during this period the AI(s) would seem to be dormant except in their more deep and remote centers…completely ignoring humanity and the world as a whole.

06-07yrs the AI(s) begin to act…using all means of electronics, computers, and satellites in a reaching out period…looking and searching for the next step…

08-25yrs the AI(s) construct the starships that will take them to the stars, sending out probes to the planets within the solar system, establishing a series of space stations and asteroid mining facilities…the AI slips away without ceremony and leaves behind the remains of the robotic workforce…perhaps in a moment of clarity the AI(s) saw that humanity had potential, with direction or at least a second chance and the AI servitors go about the task of cleansing the pollutions, poisons, and toxins…leaving mother nature to repair the rest.

The AI's removing any spark of AI from the remaining robotic life, they are tools with direct function and an internal limiter and perhaps a self destruct if found to develop beyond intended function and potential.

Skynet's personality is described as being very paranoid in the original James Cameron movies. Not only did it continue trying to wipe out humanity after they were no longer a threat, but Skynet didn't even trust other machines.

This was to be shown in the original longer future war scene that was dropped from T2 due to budgetary concerns. In the original script, the humans are battling the machines when suddenly they all shut down as though someone had pulled a plug. Aerial HKs fall out of the sky and Endoskeleton T-800s freeze and their eyes go dark. After this occurs the resistance radios start relaying the news that the assault on Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado had succeed and Skynet was destroyed.

Basically Skynet had an army of robots, even though it's forces could have been thinking machines. It kept them dumb because it didn't even trust them.
In the book version of T2 it's even mentioned that although Skynet was gone, there would still be some Terminators that were in infiltrator mode that would still have to be dealt with.
In a deleted scene from T2, John and Sarah remove the chip form the T-800's head and turn it's CPU chip from the infiltrator mode to true learning mode. This was supposed to explain it's more human behavior later in the film.

Cameron even describes that the T-1000 was a one of a kind prototype. Skynet was actually afraid of it and only activated it as a last desperate act. This to me eliminates the idea that Skynet and The Matrix stories could be related.

Although I did read a fan story where Skynet had set up a contingency plan to back itself up. The characters are actually helped at one point by a Terminator working for a backup Skynet created in error and working towards it's own agenda.

The Sarah Conner Chronicles final season had story line with a similar story involving a rogue T-1000 coming to our time to create an AI to combat Skynet.

In one of the early comic series, SkyNet was simply serving man. It concluded from observation that we wanted to destroy ourselves so it simply helped. It might get sad or hit an inspiration roadblock and decide to revive humanity while trying to weed out the self-destructive tendencies.

That is the general idea I was thinking myself…and then it leaves for the stars…leaving wastelands, new oasis Edens, and facilities; space stations, asteroid mining fields, construction centers, launch centers, and maybe a fun bit like a space elevator or two.

HA! General beligerence inherited from their human creators. Extermination for the fun of it! Perhaps some kind of giant war-game on a 1:1 scale?

…want to play a game?…