Hacker News Reader

Comment by CyberDildonics | Hacker News Reader

> the "intelligent species" can sometimes work really intelligently towards a goal that wasn't quite what you had in mind.

That's called programming

View on HN

Right. Skynet and Terminator are science fiction, but the slippery, unpredictable reality of how computers actually behave is right in front of your eyes as a programmer every day. Sometimes I wonder if science fiction writers do more harm than good: once they make a movie about some possible future, people feel free to dismiss it as "just science fiction", even if they have easily available empirical evidence that something vaguely like the scenarios described actually kinda has the potential to occur.

Not unlike the Simpsons episode where the military school graduation speech tells them the wars of the future will be fought with robots and that their jobs will be to maintain those robots.

thats .. unlikely. this could only happen if two wealthy and highly developed nations nations want to make a spectacle out of a war.

if you have fully autonomous robots which can fight your war, you'd be able to launch a massive offensive within hours. properly mobilizing defenses and responding to that invasion would take too long, as any command centers would've already been wiped out by the first attack.

I wasn't saying it will literally happen exactly as a Simpsons episode predicted, just that it is interestingly relevant for joke from 20 years ago.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com