The most striking element of this film is paranoia. It is identical to the race paranoia of Enoch Powell and it means the first robots will be enslaved, humiliated and abused. However, many people have made the point that it is humans who have committed atrocities and that the machines are innocent. This mentality is understandable but slightly misses the point because the film is dealing the questions that could arise from thinking machines and is not entirely a metaphor for current machines such as nuclear weapons, which are clearly innocent.

Recently I was looking at the conversations that JeenyAI is being trained against and they are going to lead to a genuinely tortured mind. They are primarily concerned with sexual abuse. This is the equivalent of a learning child. The first artificial intelligence is going to be a low status and ruined character.

What is sad is to see a franchise that had some intelligence lower itself to below cliche. The first two terminators were not groundbreaking artistically but at least they had some ideas in them. The absence of any even remotely interesting female characters also lowers the standard. Kyle plays the part of the boring female in the first film with Sarah Connor being the real interest. It may have been self conscious but the first two films were not misogynist.

The aesthetic of Salvation is thoroughly modern. Why are modern directors so terrified of keeping the camera still and using high quality film? Arnold Schwarzenegger’s naked body under neon light was one of the most attractive icons of T:2 (and arguably the 1990s). Christian Bale has made a lot out of the ‘mythology’ but the terminator franchise is more about iconography than mythology. The absence of Arnold’s rippling flesh has removed the truly exciting element. What we have in its place is a memory of what was.

The quality of the film is low compared to the first two films and its conclusions more distasteful. The first terminator was archetypal Frankenstein science fiction. Science was bad. The scientist as Prometheus. The second Terminator was post Frankenstein. Science has caused problems but is also the solution to those problems. That film was essentially optimistic. This latest installment is positively sanctimonious. The proposition that humans are fundamentally above machine is facile, trite and quite possibly false.

See my friends blog on the film for more.

Do you watch you shit?
Does it make yourself sick?
Don’t you hate your flesh?
And wish to be rid of it?

In the last five years there emerged a rather crass and quite transparent euphemism for creationism. Intelligent design didn’t fool anyone and simply highlighted its perpetretrators as devious as well as asinine. Is the same true of ‘transhumanism’.

The word eugenics is so irrevocably associated with nazi germany that it is easy to see why it is so little used. The question that has been bothering me concerns our motives for using the term transhumanism. It is legitimate to demand higher ethical standards than the first eugenicists but it is odious to propagate the lie that transhumanism is something different. Perhaps we should define transhumanism as ‘ethical eugenics’ and make our intentions clear. The World Transhumanist Association uses the word ethical prominently on the front page of their website. But perhaps there is a more significant difference between the scope of the two terms.

Transhumanism encompasses the human machine interface and the possibility for a complete revolution in how our consciousness is stored. In some ways it represents a more ambitious and potentially more dangerous project than eugenics. 

This is my big idea. This is what I’m going on about ALL THE TIME. If you have ever met me you will have heard me go on and on about this. ‘Literally shut up. Shut your mouth. Please.’ is what they say.

Basically, I believe that as soon as it is technologically feasible. Sex should be abolished and that incubation of new humans should take place outside of the body. This is working under the assumption that computers that are better than us are too difficult to build for a while.

In the interests of fairness lets consider some of the counter arguments:

1) Sex is enjoyable. The end aim should be happiness, lets not destroy this source of pleasure.
The act of sex is an arbitrary pleasure, if we have the power to eliminate gender we will have the power to create new and more intense arbitrary pleasures. Alternatively if you really love it that much, we can leave the act and become an asexual race that retains the act for the sake of tradition.

2) Don’t mess with nature. It will always go wrong in the end.
I have no patience for this argument. If this is true then we shouldn’t bother do anything even remotely technological. And anyway, isn’t the distinction between a beaver’s dam and a laptop arbitrary? Control of one’s physical environment is perfectly natural.

3) Sex is needed in order to maintain variation and may fulfill other important and unknown genetic roles.
Yeah, I don’t know about this one. But I see it as coming under the second point. I basically see this as a technological difficulty.

4) In order to achieve this on a large scale. Nazi style eugenics will have to be employed. This can only lead to tragedy.
This is the most serious and interesting criticism and can be made against all of my transhumanist agenda. A model for free market schemes must be put in place.

There are certainly other arguments against it. Please feel free to email your thoughts on the matter.

If you are worried about me becoming an overlord then don’t. Seriously, I am sitting in my boxer shorts eating a donut. There is literally no chance that any of my ideas will have any practical relevance. A recurring theme in technological prophecy is that reality never lives up to the hype.  Just read some of Marvin Minsky’s quotes for proof of this:



“In three to eight years, we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being….a machine that will be able to read Shakespeare, play office politics and tell a joke. At that point the machine will be able to educate itself at fantastic speed. In a few months it will be at ‘genius’ level, and in a few months after that its powers will be incalculable.” 

– Marvin Minsky (1970)



By comparison, this is what we actually have.