Genocide Via Computer

Of all the Terminator films, Rise of the Machines was certainly the most disappointing.

Directed by Jonathon Mostow in place of James Cameron, Terminator 3 came across with all the gloss, polish and adrenaline of a Hollywood action film, and none of the grit and tension of Cameron's masterpieces.

But, interestingly enough, of the three Terminator films, Rise of the Machines may have been the best-situated out of the three in terms of its prescience.

In the film, John Connor (Nick Stahl) is living "off-the-grid", with nothing but the clothes of his back and his motorcycle. He works day jobs to subsist himself, and has no place of residence, credit cards, or cell phone -- nothing that would leave a record he could be traced by.

Even though he and his now-deceased mother, Sarah Connor, have been led to believe they had averted Judgment Day by destroying Skynet, Connor lives in terror of the future, and rightfully so.

The future isn't nearly as secure as he would like to believe.

An encounter with Kate Brewster (Claire Danes) brings John face-to-face with both the T-X -- played by Kristanna Loken, a Terminator sent back to the eve of Judgment Day to kill off Connor's someday lieutenants -- and with the T-800 sent back in time to protect her -- a role again reprised by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

As it turns out, the program that eventually leads to the creation of Skynet is still in operation. Brewster's father is the head of this project, and has his own concerns about removing human decision-making from defense planning. Meanwhile, an unstoppable computer virus is overwhelming the civilian internet, and is beginning to infiltrate defense networks.

The virus is Skynet. Whether it's been seeded in the past as seems to be happening in The Sarah Connor Chronicles or is created outside the defense program and merely infiltrates it remains unexplained.

As nuclear weapons cross the globe toward their targets, what is explained is that Skynet had presumably infiltrated millions of computers worldwide.

While one presumes that nothing as hyperbolic as a genocidal computer program plotting the wholesale destruction of humanity is currently occurring, it is a well known fact that many countries -- as well as private organizations and individuals -- have been investing in cyberwarfare capabilities that would allow them to strike at their opponents through their computer systems.

China has made its commitment to cyberwarfar technology a matter of public record. North Korea, India and other countries are also investing in cyberwar technologies at an alarming rate.

One particular cyberwarfare weapon, the zombie virus, uses infected computers to pass itself along to the next victim. It attaches itself to email and fax programs, and transmits itself through the user's own communications.

These programs can have purposes ranging from the theft of information to disruption of emergency services.

In Terminator 3, the virus' purpose was to facilitate the destruction of humankind.

Interestingly, the writers of Terminator 3 could be argued to accept the "inevitability thesis" of Andy Opel and Greg Elmer. But once again, one would have to counter by arguing that preemption is only as valuable as the amount of certainty with which it can be executed, and as the diligence used to ensure that the threat it is aimed at is actually destroyed.

There Is No Inevitable Fate

"There is no fate but the one we make."

This message is at the heart of Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

The film picks up years after the original Terminator left off. Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) is in a psychiatric hospital in order to protect the public from the violent outbursts of her alleged psychotic delusions, and her son John (Edward Furlong) is in the care of foster parents.

Sarah lives in fear of the day when Skynet will either annihilate mankind with a nuclear attack or send another Terminator to kill her or her son. John, meanwhile, is living a rebellious life, angry at his current predicament.

This all changes the day that an extremely advanced terminator (played by Robert Patrick) is sent back in time to kill him. In place of Kyle Reece -- killed in the first movie -- the resistance sends a captured terminator (Schwarzenegger) back in time to protect him.

Allusions to Cold War tensions emerge for the first time in Terminator 2 as the terminator recounts for Sarah and John a more precise telling of how Judgment Day comes to pass. Skynet is designed initially as an automated pilot for stealth bombers, but eventually is placed in control of the entire defense grid of the United States -- including its arsenal of nuclear weapons.

When Skynet becomes self-aware, it responds to attempts to shut it down by launching nuclear weapons against the former Soviet Union. The notion of Mutually Assured Destruction is exploited by an entity that suddenly views the destruction of humankind as its best survival strategy.

Upon being rescued by John and the T-800, Sarah's first impulse is to slip into Mexico, away from Judgment Day's primary nuclear blast zones, in an effort to survive the initial attack.

Eventually, she decides instead to attempt to stop Skynet from ever being created by killing Myles Dyson (Joe Morton), the computer developer who will eventually create Skynet.

That attempt marks a turn in the film's plot in terms of the ideology of inevitability.

In Preempting Dissent, Greg Elmer and Andy Opel argue that preemptive action -- whether it be militarily preempting the actions of a rogue state or preempting political protests through the use of police power -- is predicated on a sense of inevitability.

In Terminator 2 James Cameron seems to reject this thesis, for a reason that seems evident to nearly anyone who thinks critically about that thesis. Preemption can only be justified if whatever it is aimed against can be prevented.

By striking against John Connor in the past, Skynet acts on the belief that its defeat by Connor in the future can be prevented. By striking against Skynet in the present -- by destroying all the research that leads to its creation -- John and Sarah act on the belief that Judgement Day can be prevented.

In choosing to collaborate with the Connors in the destruction of his work, Dyson shows a maturity that one wonders if many inventors would share -- destroying his life's work in order to prevent his life's work from taking billions of lives.

One may wonder what kind of a world we would live in today if the creators of the nuclear bomb had shown the same kind of restraint, or had heeded the warnings of Albert Einstein, whose theory of relativity actually made the splitting of the atom possible.

When the T-800 collaborates in its own destruction at the end of the film -- it cannot self-terminate, but it apparently can assist in its own termination -- it echoes Dyson's restraint.

That a machine with no real sense of human compassion -- that instead learned to mimic human compassion under John's orders -- could better comprehend the importance of such restraint than some of the arguably finest scientific minds humankind has ever produced should remain unsettling to virtually anyone.

Of course, the act of striking against a looming threat in order to avert it requires a specific amount of certainty -- first, that the threat itself can be averted, and certainty that the threat has been averted.

Preventing the weapons that humankind has created in order to defend itself from instead destroying us could never be accomplished in one fell swoop, so long as human minds remain intent on pursuing the means to destroy one another.

Fearing the Future in the Urban Environment

The Terminator was written at a time when North American society was still coming to grips with the number of urban serial killers and disturbed "spree" killers breaking out in major cities. For many people, urban environments had become -- and remain -- extremely frightening environments, with danger lurking around every corner.

Contrasted to this was the ambivalence and anomie of people more accustomed to living in those urban environments. Emile Durkheim defined anomie as, essentially, normlessness. In order for social norms to break down social complexities and the industrial division of labour had to break down traditional social value systems.

Anomie reduced the constraints on the ways one could pursue their goals. As some individuals became more and more predatory those who adhered to more traditional social norms could more easily be victimized -- whether it be through crime or ruthless business practices. That sense of victimization could manifest itself in various social problems, including domestic violence, societal withdrawal and suicide.

This anomie led to the development of truly frightening urban landscapes. Street gangs, transient substance-users and homeless people provided for an intimidating vision of a society gone horribly awry. The urban landscape was seen as hard on the mental health of its inhabitants.

The Terminator played off this concept of the urban environment. Arnold Schwarzenegger's cybernetic pseudo-character and Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) are initially framed against the image of a serial killer knocking off Sarah Connors in the very order in which they appear in the phone book.

Even after Reese saves Connor (Linda Hamilton) from the Terminator's first attempt to kill her she regards him with suspicion. The social disconnect of the urban environment -- resulting partially from the supplanting of traditional social values -- sewed deep mutual suspicion in city-dwellers.

In The Terminator James Cameron suggests that the most frightening prospect of urban life isn't necessarily the other people living that life, but rather the ultimate result of the industrialism that led to the development of the urban environment. In The Terminator's futuristic and constantly-changing future, this is a computer capable of making the decision to destroy mankind.

Cameron mixed the latent terror of the urban environment with futurism, a philosophical idea that muses about not only the potentially threatening or dehumanizing capacity of technology. Futurism is prevalent in the modern wave of neo-horror films in which technology is used to terrorize the film's protagonists.

In most of these films the threat was purported to be not technology itself, but a malevolent force that instead manifested itself through that technology. The danger was not necessary technology, but the omnipresence of it.

In the flashback scenes of The Terminator, Cameron spins this idea. Technology remains threatening, but is no longer omnipresent. Children huddle together in an underground bunker and stare into a television set in which a fire has been lit -- watching it as children did before Judgement Day. There seem to be very few telephones, no computers, and very little electricity of any kind. When a terminator arrives to clean out the bunker of human life, the danger posed by technology arrives from outside, as opposed to from within.

In The Terminator, James Cameron combined a latent suspicion of the unintended consequences of technology with the latent terror that had long become a part of urban environments.

As the one Terminator film actually produced during the Cold War it's actually rather intriguing that the political tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union would remain largely absent from the film itself. Those tensions wouldn't find a role in the franchise until the sequel.

Pop Culture and Philosophy vol. 3: Sexual Confusion In a Time of Cyber-Identity

When Ghost in the Shell was first released as an anime nearly fifteen years ago, it provoked a great deal of criticism for the sexualized nature of some of the violence.

In the film the main character, Kotoko Kusanagi, undresses before engaging in combat.

Interestingly enough, however, Ghost in the Shell is essentially about a futuristic world wherein cybernetics has advanced to the point where entire android bodies can be implanted with human brains.

Kusanagi is a member of Section 9, a police unit that consists almost entirely of full cyborgs. As a result, Kusanagi's body isn't really female. It's merely a machine built to resemble a female body. It cannot reproduce -- although the first film deals with the issue of reproduction in an intruiging manner -- and could be populated by absolutely anyone.

Sociologists have long recognized that sex and gender are often treated as the same concept, yet are markedly different. Sex is a description of the sexual characteristics of the body. Males have male sexual characteristics and females have female sexual characteristics. In terms of biology, this essentially comes down to the sex organs.

In Ghost in the Shell, fully cybernetic bodies have no sex organs. Accordingly, they can only accurately be described as asexual.

Gender, meanwhile, is a much more complex topic. Gender is largely considered to be a function of identity: a collection of the ideas, concepts and emotions one holds regarding their sexuality combined with their phsyical characteristics and impulses.

Clearly, gender confusion would be much easier to deal with in an age of cyber identity -- wherein one's physical form could be entirely customized at will so long as one were willing to compromise on conventional concepts of their own humanity.

Transplanting into a fully cybernetic body would pose to one the philosophical dilemma of embracing asexuality in order to rectify their gender confusion -- something they believe will be solved by transplanting themselves into a body of another sex.

In order for the transplanting of one's brain to fully solve their gender confusion one would have to find someone willing to have another brain implanted in their body, and their own brain implanted in someone else's.

Organized gender swapping could very much be a reality in such a world.

But it also poses larger questions about how one keeps track of identity in such a world. Many of the documents used today to keep track of one's identities deal with physical characteristics -- height, weight, hair and eye colour, skin colour and even date of birth. These are all characteristics securely grounded in time and space.

Take the case of the Japanese Foreign Affairs Minister suggested in episode one of Stand Alone Complex -- an anime series treated as separate from the feature-length films or the original manga. When the Minister gets drunk he occasionally likes to swap bodies with Geishas at a club he often frequents. The national security of Japan is eventually compromised when an individual with criminal intents steals the body of the Minister.

The individual in question has perpetrated the ultimate act of identity theft. With notions of identity naturally focused around one's body it doesn't even necessarily take a talented actor to steal one's body and, forthwith, their identity.

The individuals swapping bodies through an organized gender swapping scheme could be considered to be swapping not only their sex, but also their effective identities. While one has to imagine that a society in which the swapping of bodies is possible would have to employ more fluid methods of tracking identity, one also has to consider the likelihood that such methods would first have to breach a psychological and philosophical barrier.

Certainly, the idea that one's true identity lies somewhere other than with their body wouldn't be a new concept. Religious people believe in the soul. However, one has to remember that they treat the soul largely as an otherworldly entity. The more fluid sense of identity required for a society like that portrayed in Ghost in the Shell would need to apply such ideas in the corporeal world.

TV programs like Ghost in the Shell mount an interesting challenge to traditional notions of identity. One only has to wonder how long it will be before global civilization actually has to deal with that challenge in real life.

Death By Technology?

Patlabor reflects potential benefit, perils of technology

Sometimes the predictions about the future featured in TV and movies can be comically inaccurate.

But even when inaccurate, they sometimes contain traces of prophetic warning.

Patlabor is the tale of the chaos wrought by a monomaniacal computer programmer with a God complex. Disgusted with the hubris of the Babel project -- a large-scale land reclaimation project in 1999 Tokyo -- master programmer Eeichi Hoba programs an inentional flaw into an operating system for labors, futuristic mecha used for defence and industry in a fictional late 90s Japan.

When wind blowing against buildings produces the proper sound frequency, labors equipped with the faulty Hyper Operating Systems go berserk, unstoppably destroying everything in their path.

Patlabor seems to be yet another comically remiss prediction about the future. The robotics technology necessary to produce labors is now far more developed than in the late 1980s when the film was produced, but remains far out of reach.

Yet Patlabor seems to have predicted another technical blunder that it was believed would devestate global civilization: the infamous Y2K bug that had computer programmers working overtime for the latter portion of the 1990s in order to avert the impending disaster.

The belief was that computer programs with only two digits to record the year would crash at midnight on New Year's Eve as their programs forced them to record the year as 00.

Efforts to update the computers of government, business and the vast majority of home computers with software providing four digits to record the year were successful and it remains unknown whether or not the disaster would have actually taken place.

Patlabor provokes an intriguing question: what kind of devestation could someone with malicious intent inflict if they were able to design key defects into an important piece of technological work.

The potential ticking time bomb of such an act could even provide yet another venue for terrorism. Scientists aligned with or sympathetic to terrorists could accomplish more for a terrorist cause in one calculated act than a hundred 9/11s.

It's a frightening prospect, but it begs the question of what is actually the bigger problem: the potential to design catastrophic flaws within technologies, or developed civilization's clear over reliance on technology?

On a yearly basis, decision making power is taken out of human hands more and more often and bureaucratic decrees are enforced through computer. On a yearly basis, more and more basic tasks are taken out of human hands and performed through a machine.

The argument is that these things are making developed civilization more efficient. But as part of a wider trend, this is making developed civilization more and more vulnerable to such malicious acts.

There are, of course, solutions to these problems. Background checks on those involved in high-profile research and development programs have been part of the standard operating procedure of cutting edge R & D projects for years. This isn't likely to change any time soon.

But vigilance as a watchward is nearly always a wise idea.

Considering the stakes global civilization has invested in high technology, such vigilance remains as important as ever.

Planning For the Battlegrounds of the Future

Canadian army using sci-fi to prepare for future missions

As the Canadian Armed Forces look toward the future there's a clear premium on preparing professional soldiers for the operations of the future.

In an intriguing initiative, the Canadian Forces contracted science fiction author Karl Schroeder to produce Crisis in Zefra, a book about a peacekeeping mission set in an African city state 20 years in the future.

That was in 2005. Now, the army is set to have Schroeder pen a sequel.

The first Zefra book attempted to predict battlefield conditions in the year 2030. Zefra II will be set another ten years after that.

Of course, there are issues with trying to plan future military engagements around what one expects today.

For one thing, predictions about the future have been notoriously unreliable.

Even the most gifted individuals have had difficulty predicting future developments based on current realities. Countless children's books predicting the world of the future can attest to this.

20 years ago few people had predicted how central the internet would become to global civilization. 20 years before that many individuals doubted the commercial value of the personal computer.

Schroeder himself seems to recognize this as he admits that 2040 "is just far enough in the future that nearly everything we say is likely to be wrong."

"On the other hand, there are things that we know are coming down the pipe in the next 20 years or so and we can extrapolate from those what might be possible afterward," Schroeder explains. "So although what we end up doing will have a hugely speculative element to it, the foundations of the speculation are likely to be pretty solid."

Even if the predictions he's making are almost certainly bound to be incorrect, Schroeder asserts that there's still value in the attempt.

"That’s like painting your windshield black and driving out on the highway, as far as I’m concerned. You need to be able to look as far ahead as you can, even if it’s foggy and you can’t quite make things out," he insists.

Even if such predictions often seem to be cloudy, they often still have great merit. For example, in the December 1999 issue of Playboy magazine, Scott Ritter predicted the United States would suffer a minimum of 100,000 casualties during the act of defeating Saddam Hussein alone.

In reality, the United States suffered a comparatively negligible number of casualties during the fight against Saddam and has suffered the overwhelming majority of its casualties during the counter-insurgency effort since.

Yet Ritter's article could have persuaded many more Americans against the Iraq war, even if his specific projections proved to be inaccurate.

In particular, there seem to be some significan issues with some of the hardware-related predictions that Schroeder has made, including a "smart dust" that provides wi-fi connectivity to soldier's communication kits and weapons featuring IFF (Identify Friend/Foe) modules that won't allow them to fire in situations in which civilians may be endangered.

"A lot of guys in the military will raise their eyebrows over that and go, ‘Uh-oh, I see all kinds of pitfalls with that one.’ But it’s an interesting idea," mused Lieutenant Colonel Mike Rostek.

IFF technology is far from a new concept in military development. As Freeman Dyson notes in Weapons and Hope the need for such technology became evident as far off in history as the 1940s when British bomber commands started deploying anti-aircraft weaponry that could fire beyond visual range.

Interestingly, as a Mennonite, Karl Schroeder doesn't consider himself predisposed toward military-themed writing. "I was raised as a pacifist," he explains. "But the way I reconcile that is I’m a strong believer in a foreign policy philosophy called human security, which is championed by Lloyd Axworthy, which basically states that the state doesn’t deal just with other states. When there’s a crisis, it doesn’t really matter whether it’s a military crisis or a natural disaster or whatever, you intervene to save people. And, actually, Canada has acted on that philosophy for a number of years, and as a way of employing the army, I’m entirely in favour if it."

Attempting to predict the battlefields of the future may not be entirely reliable, but it very much is a worthwhile enterprise.

Whether or not Schroeder's work pays dividends in terms of preparedness for future conflicts is something that Canadians will have to wait 20 years to see, but it will be well worth the wait.