In 1984, moviegoers worldwide packed theaters to see "The Terminator," the classic sci-fi action flick in which Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a relentless and deadly robot from a future where machines have enslaved humanity.
The blockbuster's dystopian plot, with its robot apocalypse, came to dominate the science-fiction genre and shape the perceptions of today's tech titans, Harvard historian Jill Lepore '95 Ph.D. said during a Yale talk last week as part of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values series.
"Inescapably, it seized the imaginations of the future rulers of Silicon Valley," said Lepore, noting that Elon Musk, who was 13 when Schwarzenegger's robotic assassin wreaked havoc on the silver screen, warned in 2023 that people must worry about a Terminator future to avoid a Terminator future.
Neary two decades after the movie's release, the movie inspired Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom to contemplate the consequences of badly programmed superintelligence. In a 2003 paper, he introduced what he called "the paperclip maximizer," a thought experiment that imagines a future in which humans instruct a machine to maximize the production of paperclips, Lepore explained.
"So, the machine, merely obeying orders, kills all humans, because it reasons that it will be possible to produce more paperclips without any humans around," said Lepore.
