It’s no wonder that the young John Connor of
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
finds the whole situation quite confusing. His now hard-as-nails mother has trained him to become the future leader of the resistance, but he initially (and quite naturally) thinks she is a lunatic. And he finds it
really
confusing when a
protective
T-101 and a murderous late-model T-1000 show up. Then he realizes that
it was, is, and will be his fate
to train himself to become the future John Connor who will lead the future human insurrection. The future protects the past so it can continue being the future! Which is which?
But then his mom, Sarah, takes a break from monomaniacally training herself and her son and gets the “free will bug” big-time. She decides to defeat the time loop and defy fate by assassinating the Cyberdyne Systems genius inventor who will, in time’s original course, invent Skynet and, unwittingly and indirectly, bring about the genesis of the Terminators. She nearly succeeds, rivaling Uma Thurman in
Kill Bill
in her murderous intensity. But her son and his protective Terminator thwart the assassination, then enlist Skynet’s inventor and Sarah herself in the more definitive project of destroying Cyberdyne Systems itself. They reason that it’s better to strangle Skynet even before its birth throes. Just to be safe, the protective Terminator, whose circuitry embodies the last trace of Skynet in our present, nobly terminates himself.
There are more paradoxes coming, but let’s have a popcorn break and consider another kind of philosophical puzzle: a machine that appears to be a man.
Intermission: Call Him Mister Machine
Poor T-101! In
T2
, John Connor order’s him not to kill, teaches him moral considerations and some American slang, makes him a willing enlistee to stop his mother from murdering Miles Dyson, and then makes the Terminator the leading figure in the destruction of Cyberdyne without any direct human casualties. Schwarzenegger’s T-101, after destroying the implacable T-1000, decides
on his own
that he must be terminated in molten metal, removing the last trace of Dyson’s invention while at the same time destroying himself to defend humanity. Yet, bound by an internal survival imperative, the Terminator apparently cannot destroy himself. He asks Sarah to lower him slowly into the boiling metal. Instant tragedy! There’s a boy crying, just like in the famous final scene in the classic Western
Shane
. After saving the town and the farm from the evil gunslingers, Shane must ride into the sunset because he is, after all, a gunslinger himself. At least Shane doesn’t have to be lowered into boiling metal by his lady friend!
Now, I don’t know about you, but about ten seconds after the Terminator was fried, I began to smell human chauvinism. The Terminator’s effective suicide was too easy. Was the T-101 a mere robot? Or was he a person, a bearer of rights and autonomy?
The term “robot” was coined from the Czech word for slave,
robotnik
, but the origins of the concept of a mechanical being are much earlier. In 1747 Julien de La Mettrie (1709-1751), who had been the chief medical officer of the French army, fled the censors of Paris for the relative safety of Holland. The first out-and-out materialist of modern times, he then anonymously published
Man a Machine
,
1
only to flee the Dutch persecution as well to the protection of Frederick the Great of Prussia. La Mettrie insisted that there was no important difference between plants and animals and humans, or, more important for our purposes, between nonliving and living things. As we now know, all of these types of things are constructed from exactly the same elements and molecules and operate according to the same mechanical, physical, and chemical laws. Humans are simply complicated machines: as La Mettrie put it, we are clocks that wind our own springs. For the years that remained to him, La Mettrie took to signing his letters “Mr. Machine.” I bet the Terminator would have liked him (however, La Mettrie would certainly have scoffed at the superstitious idea that vitally sparked “living matter” could time-travel while de-sparked matter such as clothing could not!).
In his brilliant and imperishable 1950 essay “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” mathematician Alan Turing (1912-1954) proposed putting a computer in one room and a human in another and then interrogating both at length via a keyboard.
2
If experts could not reliably guess who was the computer and who was the human being, then Turing thought we should concede that the computer is a thinking thing (this has come to be called the “Turing Test”). Turing likened this to blind musical auditions where the judges cannot be biased by the physical appearance of the contestant. Turing of course anticipated that the computer would be able to deliberately make “human” mistakes in answering difficult questions, like those involving mathematical calculations. He also allowed that the computer might have to be equipped with visual and auditory receptors and sent to “school” in preparation for the test.
3
Like John Connor’s experience with the T-101, Turing expected that we might find it initially difficult to get along with a thinking machine. Turing’s critics suggested the test-passing computer, even if it was a thinking entity, still wouldn’t have a sense of humor, be able to tell right from wrong, make mistakes, or enjoy strawberries and cream. Notice that the Terminator clearly manages all of these except enjoying strawberries and cream.
Scientists pursuing artificial intelligence (AI) have spent much of the last sixty years trying to produce a computer that could pass the Turing Test. Although they have made progress, they have yet to succeed. While Turing’s original critics thought it would be a simple thing to simulate a human person, wits and all, it is now rightly regarded as so difficult that no cognitive scientist expects a Turing-certified AI anytime soon.
Look, maybe we humans will decide
not
to build intelligent, sensitive, morally savvy cyborgs. But if we do build one, teach it, befriend it, join with it in a common cause, depend for our very lives on it, and respect its moral sensitivities, then it’s not just metal, flesh, computer circuitry, or “chemicals.” It’s a person with moral autonomy and rights, including a right to its continued existence.
4
Given this understanding, the T-101 is committing suicide, and Sarah should not help him do so.
Paradoxes Galore: Why Does the Future Seem to Protect the Past?
In
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
we find that John Connor, having survived the early time-travel assaults, has made it into his twenties. To avoid further temporal onslaughts, he has become a nomad with no phone number and no fixed address. The future Skynet has nonetheless sent a third-generation she-devil Terminator (the T-X) back to assassinate John Connor’s future lieutenants, including his future wife, Kate Brewster. The T-X is also more than willing to target John Connor and an original model T-101 Terminator when they show up. Both Kate and John are protected by the T-101, whom future Kate has reprogrammed and sent back to protect the lieutenants, her earlier self, and John. Above all, its mission is to try to stop the full-fledged Skynet’s leap into the impending thermonuclear war. Although the T-X’s deadly project is derailed, Kate and John fail to stop the full realization of Skynet. “Judgment Day is inevitable,” as the original-model Terminator tells them.
But before Judgment Day, Kate and John manage to get to a massive, abandoned thermonuclear war shelter, as the ever wise and valiant T-101 planned. Of course, if they had died in the blast, then their future selves would not have been able to send back the T-101 and the third-generation Terminator would not have had to bother with her mission, either. Their deaths in the blast would also cancel out the future in which a married and fully operational rebel leader, named John Connor, would be assassinated by a T-101, the same one whom Kate Brewster would reprogram to send back to protect the future rebels and to try to save the world from Skynet.
Again and again, good and bad agents from the future are sent back to change, or to protect from change, that one and the same future. When they seek to change that future, they fail. And when they protect that future, they succeed. Mostly, anyhow.
The Terminator
, scaring us half to death with the T-101’s mechanical superiority, portrays its antagonist as a Panzer Tiger tank opposed by the equivalent of tykes on tricycles. Surely he must succeed! Yet the interventions of the T-101 as well as Kyle Reese leave the future exactly as it was before the Terminator and Reese interventions. In
Terminator 2
, the T-1000 liquid metal Terminator has the assassination of a cheeky clueless ten-year-old boy as his mission. Opposed only by an inferior original model Terminator and a superfeisty Sarah Connor, the T-1000 Terminator fails to change its past and hence our future. Even the T-101 and the redoubtable Sarah Connor fail in their attempt to change the future by eliminating the Skynet threat. The development of Cyberdyne, and hence Skynet and Judgment Day, proceeds implacably. The attempt to stop Skynet’s war fails, coincidentally resulting in John Connor and Kate surviving the thermonuclear war, so that the future does not change.
What
seems
to be happening is that the future is protecting itself against any change in the past: its order seems to conserve reality. Or, to put it another way, past, present, and future seem to form a continuum in which changes in one area must harmoniously require conservational adjustments in others. Of course, we’ve been concentrating on forces from the future that are trying unsuccessfully to change the past rather than the reverse. We might imagine a traveler sent forward from the past to change the future, as occurs in the original time-travel story, H. G. Wells’s
The Time Machine
. Doesn’t the past have to try to catch up with, or make the right moves toward, the future? Does time go forward, or backward, or both?
Time, as Saint Augustine wrote in his
Confessions
, is something so familiar that you think you understand it perfectly well until you actually think about it—and only then, of course, does it seem paradoxical and mysterious. In different ways, modern philosophy and modern physics have worried about time, with philosophers worrying about why time seems to have a direction and what makes now happen now, and physicists worrying about how much energy would be required in order to winch the space-time continuum in the
now
to whiplash the
then
—in other words, to travel through time.
Suppose time
could
start going backward. After all, physics is full of reciprocity and reversal—whatever goes up comes down, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, liquid water becomes ice much like ice becomes liquid water. So couldn’t time move backward in just the manner in which a star show in a planetarium reverses the path of the stars, or retrodicts the past? Backward causation works perfectly with the starry heavens and the wanderers—but reversals and retrodictions seem more dicey when we consider chemical, biological, and psychological reactions. In the nineteenth century, astronomer and physicist Pierre Laplace (1749-1827) reveled in this determinism, claiming that if you knew the “initial conditions” at any stage in the history of the universe, you could exactly predict what would happen in its future; equally, you could precisely retrodict the past conditions of any event. When Napoleon asked if a “Designer” had a place in his clockwork, Laplace supposedly replied, “I have no need of that hypothesis.” Of course, as a confident scientist, Laplace was insisting that the physical universe could be explained, its motions precisely predicted, without invoking supernatural forces. But perhaps he was also making the point that adding “supernatural forces” doesn’t explain anything, nor does it allow confident and precise predictions and retrodictions. For him, the phrase “Whatever happens is fated to be so” is an empty statement.
After Laplace, Albert Einstein (1879-1955) showed us that absolute space-time is an illusion but that everything still has to happen as it does from a given viewpoint. The classic example: if spaceship
x,
approaching the speed of light, happens to fly past spaceship
y
,
x
’s length and mass increases relative to
y
, while from
x
’s perspective,
y
shortens and its mass decreases. Yet these differing perspectives are equally real and correct. Einstein’s universe is just as deterministic as Laplace’s, or for that matter, Isaac Newton’s.
Scientific determinists like Laplace and Einstein seem to imply something like a “law of the conservation of reality,” on a par with the well-established laws of motion and gravity and the laws of the conservation of mass and energy. Einstein’s famous E = mc
2
not only specifies the equalities between amounts of mass and amounts of energy, but it also indicates that the total amount of mass-energy is always conserved, always remains the same. If time travel indeed is possible in Einstein’s space-time continuum, then it may very well be true that past and future times have some sort of interdependent existence. Perhaps, as someone once put it, time really is “nature’s way of preventing everything from happening all at once.”