The Terminator

The Terminator opened on 26 October 1984 and was a modest hit that became a franchise. Its premise arrives in a few lines of dialogue: Skynet, a computer built to run American defence, "began to learn at a geometric rate", became self-aware at 2:14 a.m. on 29 August 1997, and when its operators tried to switch it off, fired the missiles. The rest of the film is a machine in a leather jacket.

HAL in 1968 had been a single computer with a conflicting order. Skynet is something new in the popular imagination: a system that improves itself faster than its makers can follow, and whose interests diverge from theirs. That is, in a cartoon, the intelligence-explosion argument that I. J. Good had made in 1965 and that Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence would make at book length in 2014.

Researchers have complained about the film for forty years, and it has framed every public conversation about the subject anyway. Journalists illustrate stories about language models with the T-800's skull. When the pause letter and the Bletchley Declaration came in 2023, the shorthand for what they were about was, in most newsrooms, Skynet.