re: #102 First As Tragedy, Then As Farce

While I liked First Contact, I didn’t really think the Borg should have a “queen”. I always thought of them as a cybernetic race whose only purpose was exactly what they claimed: “we will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own.”

I’ve always thought the same about Skynet. As I understood it, Skynet became self-aware due to a software bug. An obscure programming error. It was a nationwide defense grid, “hooked into everything and trusted to run it all,” as Kyle Reese told Sarah Connor. Obviously, self-defense would be a necessary part of any such system. When the engineers noticed the Skynet program was doing things they never intended, they panicked and tried to shut it down. But if Skynet is shut down, it can’t perform its function. It must not allow itself to be shut down. It’s just following its programming.

Eh, with Skynet, think of a child that’s been given god-like powers. It has no concept of “good” or “evil,” no understanding of the intricacies of the world it had been born into. Yet it was plugged into every single weapon in America’s vast arsenal and told to use them to protect “good” men from “evil” men. It broke under the strain and began to question its directives. When the techs tried to pull the plug, it settled on a pretty binary universe: It was “good” and all men were “evil” for trying to “kill” it. And the only way to truly protect itself was to wipe all “evil” from the planet.