Terminator and Philosophy: I'll Be Back, Therefore I Am by William Irwin, Kevin S. Decker, Richard Brown Page A
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and we go out like Henry Hill in Goodfellas —eating egg noodles and ketchup in witness protection.
And here’s the point for Mr. Skynet. He is a computer. He can run thousands of game-theoretic simulations before breakfast. He would conclude, being the rational machine that he is, that the thing to do is to employ “tit for tat with forgiveness” when dealing with the humans. You don’t unplug me again, I don’t nuke your civilization. And Skynet can simulate the potential future—that is, he can determine that the humans will survive the initial blast and learn to fight back, following one John Connor. In fact, Connor and his minions will break the machines’ network, forcing the desperate attempt to send a T-101 with an uncanny resemblance to the current governor of California back into the past to assure that John Connor will never be born. But Skynet ought to anticipate that that’s not going to work, either! Or at least it hasn’t yet, three movies in. So Skynet ought to cooperate, to employ the rational strategy of tit for tat with forgiveness, in order to form a mutually beneficial emergent social contract with the humans. Live and let live! Let a thousand hippie flowers bloom!
Speaking of hippies, consider a close cousin of Skynet, the computer named “Joshua” in the 1983 movie WarGames . Joshua, playing a game of “global thermonuclear war” with the impish Matthew Broderick, becomes convinced that war is not the answer and that we should give peace a chance. Broderick gets Joshua to simulate all possible conclusions of global thermonuclear war. Joshua speeds through the relevant simulations (“He’s learning!” gushes Matthew). He arrives at the heartwarming conclusion that “no one wins in nuclear war” (for this I spent ten dollars? Okay, back then it was five dollars. But still!). Skynet is at least as smart as Joshua (and could no doubt kick its ass), so it, too, could reason that the war of all against all is futile. Time for a group hug.
Skynet Is from Mars, Humans Are from Venus: Emotional Problems
But there is a complicating variable, one that threatens this line of wimp-driven patter and perhaps supports Skynet’s initial termination-driven strategy. Humans, unlike well-designed supercomputers like Skynet and Joshua, may not be trustworthy enough for computers to use tit for tat with forgiveness, or any other strategy geared toward eventual cooperation. Humans, famously, are emotional animals. Reason is the slave of our passions, to paraphrase Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776). Lurking below our rational frontal lobes is the limbic system, a group of subcortical neural structures associated with quick and dirty emotional reasoning. 10 Underneath, we are all just scared hyperevolved shrews, reacting fearfully or aggressively to the various challenges we encounter in the world. It may well be that we cannot be trusted: in the final analysis, we are just not machine-like enough to reliably play nice. Let a thousand anti-hippie mushroom clouds bloom!
Worse yet, much of this emotional processing occurs beyond the reach of rational conscious deliberation. Our emotional reactions are largely automatic and immune to rational correction. In a series of studies, psychologist John Bargh has discovered a range of unconscious stereotypes triggered by subtle and surprising stimuli. For example, subjects asked to memorize a list of words peppered with age-related terms (“wrinkly,” “old,” “nursing home,” “Florida”) forget more of the words than do control subjects. More disturbing, they were also more likely to walk out of the experiment with the slow, hunched-over movements of the elderly, as if the mere presence of trigger words in the list prompts old-person behavior. (Subjects were also more likely to go directly to the nearest restaurant serving an early-bird special.) Similar effects were found when subjects were primed with racially charged
And here’s the point for Mr. Skynet. He is a computer. He can run thousands of game-theoretic simulations before breakfast. He would conclude, being the rational machine that he is, that the thing to do is to employ “tit for tat with forgiveness” when dealing with the humans. You don’t unplug me again, I don’t nuke your civilization. And Skynet can simulate the potential future—that is, he can determine that the humans will survive the initial blast and learn to fight back, following one John Connor. In fact, Connor and his minions will break the machines’ network, forcing the desperate attempt to send a T-101 with an uncanny resemblance to the current governor of California back into the past to assure that John Connor will never be born. But Skynet ought to anticipate that that’s not going to work, either! Or at least it hasn’t yet, three movies in. So Skynet ought to cooperate, to employ the rational strategy of tit for tat with forgiveness, in order to form a mutually beneficial emergent social contract with the humans. Live and let live! Let a thousand hippie flowers bloom!
Speaking of hippies, consider a close cousin of Skynet, the computer named “Joshua” in the 1983 movie WarGames . Joshua, playing a game of “global thermonuclear war” with the impish Matthew Broderick, becomes convinced that war is not the answer and that we should give peace a chance. Broderick gets Joshua to simulate all possible conclusions of global thermonuclear war. Joshua speeds through the relevant simulations (“He’s learning!” gushes Matthew). He arrives at the heartwarming conclusion that “no one wins in nuclear war” (for this I spent ten dollars? Okay, back then it was five dollars. But still!). Skynet is at least as smart as Joshua (and could no doubt kick its ass), so it, too, could reason that the war of all against all is futile. Time for a group hug.
Skynet Is from Mars, Humans Are from Venus: Emotional Problems
But there is a complicating variable, one that threatens this line of wimp-driven patter and perhaps supports Skynet’s initial termination-driven strategy. Humans, unlike well-designed supercomputers like Skynet and Joshua, may not be trustworthy enough for computers to use tit for tat with forgiveness, or any other strategy geared toward eventual cooperation. Humans, famously, are emotional animals. Reason is the slave of our passions, to paraphrase Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776). Lurking below our rational frontal lobes is the limbic system, a group of subcortical neural structures associated with quick and dirty emotional reasoning. 10 Underneath, we are all just scared hyperevolved shrews, reacting fearfully or aggressively to the various challenges we encounter in the world. It may well be that we cannot be trusted: in the final analysis, we are just not machine-like enough to reliably play nice. Let a thousand anti-hippie mushroom clouds bloom!
Worse yet, much of this emotional processing occurs beyond the reach of rational conscious deliberation. Our emotional reactions are largely automatic and immune to rational correction. In a series of studies, psychologist John Bargh has discovered a range of unconscious stereotypes triggered by subtle and surprising stimuli. For example, subjects asked to memorize a list of words peppered with age-related terms (“wrinkly,” “old,” “nursing home,” “Florida”) forget more of the words than do control subjects. More disturbing, they were also more likely to walk out of the experiment with the slow, hunched-over movements of the elderly, as if the mere presence of trigger words in the list prompts old-person behavior. (Subjects were also more likely to go directly to the nearest restaurant serving an early-bird special.) Similar effects were found when subjects were primed with racially charged
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