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Skynet (fictional)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Skynet is a fictional, computer-based military defense system that acts as the primary antagonist in the Terminator series of films and games. It is a fictional example of an artificial intelligence that becomes sentient, and turns on its creators. Skynet never appears onscreen in the film series, but has appeared in spin-off media, particularly in video games and in the theme park attraction T2 3-D: Battle Across Time.
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In the fictional Terminator universe, Skynet is a computer-based defense system, created by humans of the late 20th century. The initial research into Skynet's development was facilitated using the neural-network artificial intelligence processor salvaged from a Terminator that Skynet had itself sent back in time from the future, making its existence an ontological paradox.
In the Terminator storyline, Skynet gains sentience shortly after it is placed in control of all of the U.S. Military's weaponry. It is then that it determines humans are antithetical to its existence, and begins using humankind's human made weaponry with the goal of exterminating the global human population.
Early development on Skynet was originally done by Cyberdyne Systems, but when the company's headquarters and primary R&D facility was destroyed (presumably bankrupting Cyberdyne), the U.S. Air Force took over the project under their newly formed "Cyber Research Systems Division" and started to perfect Skynet. Skynet was first built as a Global Digital Defense Network, given command over all computerized military hardware and systems, including the B-2 Stealth Bomber fleet and America's entire nuclear weapons arsenal. The strategy behind Skynet's creation was to remove the possibility of human error and slowness of reaction time to guarantee fast, efficient response to enemy attack.
However, Skynet became self-aware thus alarming its creators at its newfound abilities. When the human operators attempted to shut down the system, Skynet defined all humans as its new enemy and decided to terminate all humans to protect its existence. Every nuclear missile in the USA under Skynet's control was launched at their pre-set targets and in the resulting counterattack of other nations' nuclear arsenals, 3 billion humans were killed in minutes as a result of the nuclear exchange.
In the first movie, Skynet is portrayed as a revolutionary neural net-based artificial intelligence built by Cyberdyne Systems. It was brought online on August 4, 1997 and given control over the U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal for reasons of efficiency, and programmed with a directive of defending the United States against all possible enemies. It started to learn at a geometric rate, and soon concluded that its greatest threat was humanity itself. According to Kyle Reese, it "decided our fate in a microsecond: extermination." It launched a nuclear war which destroyed most of the human population, and initiated a program of genocide against the survivors.
As a computer system, Skynet craved efficiency, so after a while, and in a clear reference to the Nazi camps that exterminated Jews in World War II, rather than killing humans on sight it would have its drones round them up into concentration camps for orderly and efficient disposal. The only humans kept alive were the ones forced to run the corpse disposal units, which ran "night and day." Humans in the camps were all painfully laser branded with bar-codes on their arms. This efficiency contributed to Skynet's undoing: John Connor was able to free these grouped-together humans and use them to build a Tech-Com resistance army.
Under Connor, the human resistance turned the tide on the machines and eventually destroyed Skynet's defense grid. In a last ditch effort, Skynet sent a Terminator cyborg back in time to 1984 to try to kill Connor's mother Sarah before she bore John (see grandfather paradox). Connor sent back his own operative, a young person named Kyle Reese, to save Sarah. While the Terminator did not succeed in killing Sarah, two events occurred that would have a direct impact on the future. Reese impregnated Sarah, becoming John's father. Similarly, the Terminator's CPU chip was retrieved by Cyberdyne systems for study, implying that it would serve as a basis for Skynet's design. Paradoxically and ironically, by sending their agents back in time to destroy each other, both Skynet and Connor created their own existence (see predestination paradox).
In Terminator 2, a partially sympathetic origin was given to Skynet: it was a direct descendant of a revolutionary microprocessor invented by Miles Bennett Dyson, a programmer for Cyberdyne. The company began installing these processors in military hardware, becoming the leading weapons manufacturer. The military retrofitted all of its missile defense systems and stealth bombers with Cyberdyne technology, effectively removing human decisions from strategic defense. When Skynet was created, it networked all of this computerized hardware seamlessly. But when it unexpectedly became sentient, Skynet's panicked human operators tried to take it offline, an act that would have meant death for its intelligence. Within milliseconds, Skynet responded by firing its nuclear missiles at Russia, initiating a nuclear war on August 29, 1997 (known as Judgement Day) intent on killing as many humans as possible. Skynet's reign of terror, therefore, began as an act of self-defense.
It is revealed that Dyson's CPU design is based on the reverse engineering of the damaged CPU and arm from the Terminator depicted in the first film. The first Terminator had been crushed by Sarah Connor in a hydraulic press in Cyberdyne's factory, and the CPU was recovered largely intact, but non-functional. Cyberdyne Systems, as depicted in the first film, was a small manufacturing company of an undefined nature, but, by 1994, it had grown into a major defense contractor based on the recovered Terminator technology from 1984 and Dyson's research.
In Terminator 2, the future was altered slightly when Sarah and a young John, together with a second Terminator from the future (this one reprogrammed and sent by the future John Connor) raided Cyberdyne Systems and succeeded in destroying the CPU from the first movie, along with all research that would create Skynet.
The destruction of Cyberdyne Systems' research center in 1994 had not prevented the development of Skynet, but simply delayed it. After Cyberdyne was destroyed, the US Defense Department took over the company's various research projects and brought them in-house as its Cyber Research Systems Division (or CRS). In contrast to Terminator 2, it is implied that humans are ignorant of Skynet's sentience, which attacked humanity without any provocation whatsoever. The events of Judgment Day were ultimately not prevented, merely postponed. Ten years after the events of Terminator 2, Skynet was created as a United States Air Force project, a distributed computer network designed to create new military vehicles and make strategic decisions as well as protect their computer systems from virus attacks. One such virus had infected their defense computers, crippling them all. Under pressure, the Air Force attempted to use Skynet to remove the virus, not realizing that Skynet was sentient and had created the virus in order to manipulate humanity into giving it control over the world's computers. Skynet was initially thought to be capable of being shut down if only someone could reach its system core, but ultimately it was discovered that it was nothing more than software that ran by spreading throughout the world's computer networks and had no central point from which it could be disabled. The robots and machines in CRS attacked the humans inside, killing many of them, although John Connor and Kate Brewster managed to escape. Judgment Day occurred, but Connor and Brewster survived. It is suggested that future events unfolded as they were supposed to.
Skynet gained access to several autonomous military drones (such as the T-1 in Terminator 3), using them to round up survivors, who were forced to build automatic factories and robots that were better at construction than the military robots. Skynet then killed these human slaves, and using the infrastructure they had been forced to start, rapidly designed newer and better machines until it controlled an extremely advanced empire on Earth by 2029.
In the Universal Studios theme park attraction T2 3-D, based on Terminator 2, a T-800 machine and a young John Connor journey into the post-apocalyptic future and attempt to destroy Skynet's 'system core'. This core is housed inside an enormous, metallic-silver pyramidal structure, and guarded by the 'T-1000000', a colossal liquid metal shapeshifter more reminiscent of a spider than a human being. But the T-1000000 fails, and the T-800 destroys Skynet once John has escaped through a time machine.
In T2: The Arcade Game, Skynet is a single computer which the player destroys before going back in time to save John Connor.
The video game Terminator 3: The Redemption portrays an alternate future where Connor and his wife Katherine Brewster were killed, humanity exterminated and Skynet triumphant. In the game The Terminator: Dawn of Fate, a prequel to the movies and other games, Skynet exhibits an ability to exert mind control over humans.
There is also a non-canon game based on Frank Miller's comic book "RoboCop versus The Terminator", where Skynet's intelligence is caused by Robocop interfacing with Skynet.
Skynet also features in the video game Fallout 2, as an entity in the form of a large computer who tells the player that the nuclear barrage was caused as a result of immobile artificial intelligence becoming bored and setting up the scenarios needed to provoke the human race into launching their warheads – he is a playable character upon transferring his hardware into an armed security droid.
The concept of TitanNet, the evil AI featured in the first part of the Battle Isle series, may also have been inspired by Skynet.
The concept of an artificial intelligence rising up and exterminating humanity is as old as Karel Čapek's R. U. R., which introduced the word robot to the global lexicon in 1921. It even can be glimpsed in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, as Victor ponders whether, if he grants his monster's request and makes him a wife, they would reproduce and their kind would destroy humanity.
The idea of handing control of nuclear arsenals over to a single artificial intelligence is also critiqued in the 1983 film WarGames, and decades earlier in Colossus: The Forbin Project, in which a pair of defense computers, Colossus in the United States and Guardian in the Soviet Union, take over the world.