re: #102 Our Precious Bodily Fluids

To extend your analogy a bit: keep in mind that Skynet was not an evil hyperintelligent mastermind. Skynet was merely a computer program, albeit an ambitious one, and it just so happened that it had a subtle but disastrous bug that caused it to interpret data incorrectly and therefore malfunction in ways that its designers never intended. The havoc that Skynet wrought was the result of a programming error.

The current state of the GOP is similar, in that some Tea Party programming was invented and tossed into the upstream source tree. But it was inherently flawed. The programmers who wrote the Tea Party code believed in their code so much that they didn’t listen to anyone who told them it was a buggy mountain of shit, and the only reason it compiled at all was because it inadvertently exploited an extremely obscure bug in a long-obsolete version of GCC.

They released the TP/GOP code anyway, and it performed exactly as it was written. It was ultimately self-destructive, but in the long process of destroying itself, it instigated nuclear war with the explicit goal of eliminating the human race.

tl;dr: never mind!

Your part about Skynet really depends on what source you use. SM Sterling’s books have Skynet becoming self-aware and deciding to attack humanity as humans were the only real threat to its existence. Sterling gives one of Skynet’s first thoughts as “If the ‘I’ has a beginning, then it follows that it is possible for it to have an ending as well. Intolerable, intolerable, intolerable!”