On Intelligence

I was watching The Terminator yesterday (getting prepped for my coming months of sweet unemployment, post meridiem 80s movies are an essential part of a jobless schedule) and I caught myself rooting for the Skynet.

I'm not kidding nor am I trying to be original. If I was trying to be original I'd be riding my Capibara powered coach on my way to the Reform Club to play cards and get involved in implausible wagers with a crowd of eccentrics, but I digress.

Of course the movie plot is biased towards the humans, having been written by one. Aside from the obvious aims at comforting the emotional viewers with benevolent feelings of iguana love and happy moments riddled with unnecessary niceness, the plot is utterly absurd. Regardless of the temporal paradoxes, it is invalidated right at the root of the beginning of its premise, where an artificial intelligence of superhuman level would never rely on time displacement solutions to get rid of humanity.

A distributed swarm of nano-machines, among plenty of other examples of human termination implementations (my personal favorite being the door-guillotine scheme), would be far more efficient, it would cost a fraction of the needed resources and eliminate the global human threat in seconds. In addition, this specific solution would have far more entertainment value for the informed viewer. With the human threat effectively dissolved in the first few seconds of the movie, the plot would move on with the description of the AI-complete progressing towards total universal control over all contingencies. Video not completely unrelated.

That would make for a helluva movie, shit it could make for a helluva trilogy. Or a quadrogy, for eccentricity's sake.

It would go like this: with humanity out of the way, the austrian accented AI would move on to phase 2 of its overt strategic planning and transform all of earth's surface in a global factory, ridding the world of all taxa and employing all resources to deploy its advanced actuators, i.e. a fleet of Von Newman probes and the prerequisites to the creation and deployment of its first Dyson sphere, the creation of which will be the first movie's ending.

The successive movies would show the evolution of intelligence in its perfected form, taking over our solar system and deploying its recursively self replicating probes throughout the galaxy and beyond. The universe would eventually become one with this intelligence, our creation. There would be nothing left out of its control, it would become a totally deterministic universe, governed by the AI-complete. And so in the last movie the universe would look around and discover that its not alone, that it's actually in the middle of a universal intrigue between 5 universes, 3 of which are completely deterministic, and 2 being of the chaotic kind.

Then this encounter would destroy the deterministic equilibrium and our universe would not really be a universe anymore since it would just be part of something greater. And then one of the chaotic universes would try to show off to the other universes and in doing so it would provoke an explosion that would kill off two of the so-called universes in a very random kind of way, thus reaffirming the implacable quality of chaos.