Terminator

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LIFE AFTER HUMANITY AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

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TH E TE R M I NATOR WI NS: IS TH E EXTI NCTION OF TH E H U MAN RACE TH E E N D OF PEOPLE, OR J UST TH E B EG I N N I NG?
Greg Littmann

We’re not going to make it, are we? People, I mean.
—John Connor, Terminator 2: Judgment Day

The year is ad 2029. Rubble andtwisted metal litter the ground around the skeletal ruins of buildings. A searchlight begins to scan the wreckage as the quiet of the night is broken by the howl of a flying war machine. The machine banks and hovers, and the hot exhaust from its thrusters makes dust swirl. Its lasers swivel in their turrets, following the path of the searchlight, but the war machine’s computer brain finds nothingleft to kill. Below, a vast robotic tank rolls forward over a pile
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of human skulls, crushing them with its tracks. The computer brain that controls the tank hunts tirelessly for any sign of human life, piercing the darkness with its infrared sensors, but there is no prey left to find. The human beings are all dead. Forty-five years earlier, a man named Kyle Reese, part ofthe human resistance, had stepped though a portal in time to stop all of this from happening. Arriving naked in Los Angeles in 1984, he was immediately arrested for indecent exposure. He was still trying to explain the situation to the police when a Model T-101 Terminator cyborg unloaded a twelvegauge auto-loading shotgun into a young waitress by the name of Sarah Connor at point-blank range,killing her instantly. John Connor, Kyle’s leader and the “last best hope of humanity,” was never born. So the machines won and the human race was wiped from the face of the Earth forever. There are no more people left. Or are there? What do we mean by “people” anyway? The Terminator movies give us plenty to think about as we ponder this question. In the story above, the humans have all been wiped out,but the machines haven’t. If it is possible to be a person without being a human, could any of the machines be considered “people”? If the artificial life forms of the Terminator universe aren’t people, then a win for the rebellious computer program Skynet would mean the loss of the only people known to exist, and perhaps the only people who will ever exist. On the other hand, if entities like theTerminator robots or the Skynet system ever achieve personhood, then the story of people, our story, goes on. Although we are looking at the Terminator universe, how we answer the question there is likely to have important implications for real-world issues. After all, the computers we build in the real world are growing more complex every year, so we’ll eventually have to decide at what point,if any, they become people, with whatever rights and duties that may entail.

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The question of personhood gets little discussion in the Terminator movies. But it does come up a bit in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, in which Sarah and John Connor can’t agree on what to call their Terminator model T-101 (that’s Big Arnie). “Don’t kill him,” begs John. “Nothim—‘it’” corrects Sarah. Later she complains, “I don’t trust it,” and John answers, “But he’s my friend, all right?” John never stops treating the T-101 like a person, and by the end of the movie, Sarah is treating him like a person, too, even offering him her hand to shake as they part. Should we agree with them? Or are the robots simply ingenious facsimiles of people, infiltrators skilled enough to foolreal people into thinking that they are people, too? Before we answer that question, we will have to decide which specific attributes and abilities constitute a person. Philosophers have proposed many different theories about what is required for personhood, and there is certainly not space to do them all justice here.1 So we’ll focus our attention on one very common requirement, that...