Month: September 2023

Plot:

In this fifth and worst (so far) movie in the Terminator franchise, familiar ground is trod again, but the viewer’s expectations are also upended. The movie opens in 2029, as a strike team led by rebel leader John Connor and his aide Kyle Reese attacks Skynet’s main base. As in past films, the attack succeeds, but not before a Terminator uses a time machine to go to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor. Kyle Reese is sent through the machine to protect her, but here the plotline twists: while John Connor and his men are watching Reese teleport into the past, a Terminator emerges from the back of the room, runs up behind John Connor and infects him with a nanomachine “disease” that transforms him into an advanced Terminator.

From that point on, the Terminator Genisys manages to have a story that is overly complicated but very stupid at the same time (just like too many action films made in the last 10 years). I won’t waste my time describing every contrivance and every side-plot that exists only for fan service. Suffice it to say Sarah Connor, Kyle Reese, and a friendly T-800 played by elderly Arnold Schwarzenegger team up to destroy Skynet, and evil robot John Connor goes back in time to stop them. He’s so advanced that it’s doubtful whether the other three can stop him.

The rehashing of scenes, events (2029 final attack on Skynet, Reese and Terminator teleporting into 1984 from the future), and characters from earlier movies is a testament to how unoriginal it is, and how hard it banks on fan service to have any appeal. But even that appeal is minimal: While Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor were relatable characters with depth of personality in the first film, they are one-dimensional caricatures in Genisys. The development of a romance between the two in the first film was believable and tragic, whereas in this remake, the lack of personal chemistry between the actors playing them is striking.

Schwarzenegger’s performance in the first movie was so stolid and intimidating that it became iconic. Now, he seems like an aging father that is reduced to being a background character in his high-strung teen daughter’s chaotic life. Having the homey and vaguely comical name “Pops” encapsulates his diminishment. The terrifyingly relentless and resilient T-1000 from Terminator 2 makes a guest appearance and is easily destroyed this time around. In summary, all the same notes from the better, earlier films are struck, but they ring hollow.

Terminator Genisys is the worst film in the Terminator franchise, and I understand why the next movie, Terminator Dark Fate, canceled it out by pretending like its events never happened. If there ever was a cash-grab devoid of any creativity or passion, this is it. Don’t watch it.

Analysis:

First, bear in mind I’m skipping any futuristic elements of this film that I discussed in my reviews of the other Terminator movies. You can read those here:

• Terminator 1 review
• Terminator 3 review
• Terminator 4 review
• Terminator 6 review

Robots will have superhuman reflexes. During the introductory combat scene where the humans raid Skynet’s base, the machine forces consist of humanoid T-800s, tilt-engine “Hunter-Killer” aircraft, and “Spider Tanks.” While the first two of those have been in every previous Terminator film, the last is new. Spider Tanks are quadrupedal fighting machines with plasma guns for arms. Overall, they’re about the size of small tanks. Each Hunter-Killer aircraft carries a Spider Tank attached to its belly, and they are air-dropped into the middle of the base within minutes of the human attack. One of the Spider Tanks starts delivering accurate fire at the human infantrymen while it is still in free-fall, and it continues shooting after hitting the ground at high speed.

This depiction of future robots having superhuman reflexes will prove accurate. In fact, the fire control systems in modern tanks and naval guns might already have the same capabilities as the Spider Tank aiming systems (able to hit moving targets with bullets while the tank or ship is also moving). If not, incremental improvements will surely close the gap. More generally, physical feats demanding fine dexterity, flexibility and bodily coordination that only the most skilled and highly trained humans can do today, like hitting a moving target with a bullet while you are also moving, throwing a dart onto a tiny bullseye from eight feet away, or doing a gymnastics performance that would win an Olympic gold medal, will be easy for multipurpose, human-sized robots by the end of this century. We will be surpassed in every way.

Machines will learn a lot about you from a single glance. At the start of the fight scene between Pops and the younger T-800 that has just emerged from the time portal, there’s a shot showing things from the latter’s perspective. We see the usual red tinting and text overlaid across its field of view. Simple graphics also show the T-800 scan Pops, identifying him as a fellow android and also identifying his gun (a Remington shotgun) along with its range.

This is accurate. Today’s best neural networks can already describe what they see in an image (a task called “visual question answering”) with over 80% accuracy. The multi-year trend has been one of steady improvement, leaving no doubt they will be as good as we are (presumably, 99% accurate) in the near future. Machine abilities to understand what they see in videos (“video question answering”) are less advanced, but also steadily improving. Again, there’s every reason to expect them to ultimately reach human levels of competency.

Machines could also potentially have much better eyesight than humans thanks to a variety of technologies like telephoto lenses and digital sensors that are more light-sensitive than human eyes, able to capture light from wavelengths that are invisible to us, and able to see finer details. Things that look blurry to us, either due to long distance or because the object is moving, would look clear to a machine that could be built with today’s technology.

Additionally, computers have the potential to process and analyze the contents of what they see faster than the human brain can. As a result, a machine could comfortably watch a movie at 10 times the normal speed–which would look like a disorienting blur of motion and shapes to us–and accurately answer whatever questions you had about it at the end. In a split second, it could notice levels of detail that most humans would need several minutes of staring at a still image to absorb.

These abilities will have many uses for machines in the future, a subset of which will involve combat. Yes, like the T-800 in the film, a fighting machine in just 20 years will be able to visually recognize humans, even at long distances and under poor light conditions, as well as the weapons and other gear they were carrying. At a glance, it would know what your weapon’s capabilities were, along with how much ammunition you were carrying. It could use that information to its advantage by doing things like keeping track of how many bullets you fired so it would know the exact instant you ran out and needed to switch magazines. From its initial glance at you, the fighting machine would also know how much body armor you were wearing, allowing it to jump out and target your unprotected areas during that brief pause in your ability to fire.

Robots will be able to detach parts of themselves to perform specific functions. Unlike in Terminator 2, this film’s T-1000 detaches parts of his own body when it is useful to his mission. At one point, as Kyle, Sarah and Pops are speeding away in a van, part of the T-1000’s hand separates so it can stick to the back of the vehicle and serve as a tracking device. When it catches up to them, the T-1000 turns its arm into a javelin, which it then throws at Pops, impaling him against a wall.

Being able to detach body parts will be a very useful attribute for many types of future robots. At the very least, it would let them replace their damaged or worn-out parts easily. The ability could also make them more survivable. For example, imagine a robot butler falling down a deep well and getting trapped because the walls were too slick for it to climb out and they also blocked the radio distress signals it sent out. Rather than wait to run out of power and rust away, the robot could detach one of its arms and throw it up and out of the well. After landing on the ground outside, the arm would send its own distress signal and/or use its fingers to crawl towards help.

That of course requires the robot’s systems to be distributed throughout its body, with the head (if it has one), torso, and each limb having a computer, a battery, sensors, and a wireless chip for communicating with the rest of the robot if physically severed from it. The redundancy, survivability, and functional flexibility of such a layout will be especially valuable for combat robots, which are expected to take damage but to also to complete critical tasks. If a combat robot like a T-800 were cut in half at the waist, the bottom half could still run towards and kick the enemy while the upper half used its arms to crawl towards him and attack. If blown to bits, the T-800 body parts that were still functional could still perceive their surroundings, communicate with each other, and try to put themselves back together again or to complete the mission to the best of their abilities separately. Fighting with machines like this would be very hard and demoralizing since every part of one of them would need to be neutralized before it was safe.

There will also be advantages to some robots carrying smaller, task-specific robots inside of themselves to be released when needed. Imagine an android carrying a small quadcopter drone in an empty space in its chest cavity. It could open a small hatch on its chest to release the drone or even spit it out of its mouth. The flying drone could transmit live aerial footage to give the android an overhead view of the area, letting it see things it couldn’t from ground level. A combat machine like a T-800 might carry flying drones that were fast enough to chase down cars and blow them up with a bomb, or inject their occupants with lethal toxins from a stinger.

Very advanced machines that won’t exist until the distant future could have organic qualities letting them “assemble” smaller robots internally and then expel them to complete tasks.

Getting back to the point, the movie’s depiction of an advanced robot being able to detach parts of its body and then throw them at people and things to accomplish various ends is accurate. The robots won’t be made of liquid metal, so the projected objects will be of fixed forms, but the end result will be the same. A future combat machine could detach its hand and throw it at the back of a van that was speeding away, the hand would grab onto something on the back door, and it would turn on its location-finding system to effectively turn itself into a tracking device. Alternatively, the combat machine could release from its body a small flying drone that could overtake the van and latch onto it, or at least follow it in the air.

Gradual replacement of human cells with synthetic matter could turn people into machines. A major plot twist is that John Connor has been “converted” into a Terminator through a process in which a swarm of microscopic machines rapidly took over all his cells, one at a time. Within a few minutes, he transformed from the hero of the human resistance to a minion of Skynet. Important details about the conversion process are never explained (including whether the machines are micro- or nanoscale), but the persistence of John’s memories and personality even after being turned into a robot indicates the machines mapped the fine details of his brain structure. It stands to reason that the same information was gathered about all the other cells in his body before they were all transformed into synthetic tissue.

Something like this could work, though it will require extremely advanced technology and the conversion would take longer than it did in the film. The process would involve injecting the person with trillions of nanomachines, which would migrate through their body until one was inside of or attached to each cell (a typical human cell is 100 micrometers in diameter whereas a ribosome–the quintessential organic nanomachine–is 30 nanometers wide, a size difference of 1 : 3,333). The nanomachines would spend time studying their assigned cells and how they related to the cells around them. Large scanning machines outside of the person’s body would probably be needed to guide the nanomachines, send them instructions, collect their data, and maybe provide them with energy.

After the necessary data on the locations and activities of all the person’s cells were gathered, the conversion process could start. The nanomachines already in the person’s body might be able to do this, or a new wave of specialized “construction” nanomachines might need to be introduced. Every cell would be broken down and the molecules reassembled to make a synthetic cell or some other type of structure of equal size. For example, if a person wanted ultra-strong bones, nanomachines would break down each bone cell and reuse its carbon molecules to make matrices of carbon nanotubules.

The utmost care would be taken to control the speed of the conversion and to monitor the person’s life signs to make sure it wasn’t getting out of control and killing them. As each original cell was replaced, its successor would be tested again and again to ensure it mimicked the important qualities of its predecessor.

The conversion of the brain would, by far, be the most important part of the process, and hence the part done with the greatest care and oversight. Our memories, personalities, and consciousness directly arise from the microscopic structures of our brain cells and their intricate patterns of physical connections to each other. Even small mistakes transforming those cells into synthetic analogs would effectively “kill” the person by destroying their mind and replacing it with a stranger’s. For that reason, the procedure will bear no resemblance to what happened in the film, where Kyle Reese was apparently jabbed with a needle full of microscopic machines and then spent some time kicking and screaming as he felt them take over his cells. Instead, it will happen in a hospital room, with the patient surrounded by medical machines of all kinds that were monitoring and guiding the nanomachines and equipped to pause their work if necessary and to render lifesaving aid. And instead of minutes, it will take days or weeks. Multiple sessions might be needed.

What would be the point of this? Reengineering the human body at the cellular level would let us transcend the limitations of biology in countless ways. We could use electricity for energy, be bulletproof, directly merge our minds and bodies with machines, and achieve a level of substrate plasticity that would set us up for further iterations of radical augmentation that we can’t imagine.

Microscopic machines will be able to rapidly phase-change. In the final fight between John Connor and Pops, John’s technological abilities are fully utilized. While they are grappling, John’s body rapidly dissolves into a cloud of his constituent microscopic machines, which flow around Pops in pulses, delivering several concussive blows to the front of his body. The particles then rapidly reassemble into John’s body behind Pops, and John’s right arm hardens into a sword which he uses to chop off Pops’ arm. This means John’s microscopic machines managed to transform from a vapor cloud into a solid object as hard as high-grade steel in one or two seconds.

I think it’s possible to create microscopic machines that can form into swarms and then work together to change the phase (solid, liquid, vapor) and macro-shape of the swarm, I doubt the swarms will be able to move around or switch phases that fast.

In the 32 years since Terminator 2 came out and introduced the world to the idea of a shapeshifting robot, scientists and engineers have made pitifully little progress developing the enabling technologies. It only exists in the realm of theory, and the theoretical technology that is the best candidate is the “foglet” (also called “utility fog”). Scientist J. Storrs Hall conceived of it in 1993:

In essence, the utility fog would be a polymorphic material comprised of trillions of interlinked microscopic ‘foglets’, each equipped with a tiny computer. These nanobots would be capable of exerting force in all three dimensions, thus enabling the larger emergent object to take on various shapes and textures. So, instead of building an object atom by atom, these tiny robots would link their contractible arms together to form objects with varying properties, such as a fluid or solid mass.

To make this work, each foglet would have to serve as a kind of pixel. They’d measure about 10 microns in diameter (about the size of a human cell), be powered by electricity, and have twelve arms that extrude outwards in the formation of a dodecahedron. The arms themselves would be 50 microns long and retractable. Each foglet would have a tiny computer inside to control its actions. “When two foglets link up they’ll form a circuit between each them so that there will be a physical electrical network,” said Hall, “that way they can distribute power and communications.”

The arms themselves will swivel on a universal joint at the base, and feature a three-fingered gripper at the ends capable of rotating around the arm’s axis. Each gripper will grasp the hands of another foglet to create an interleaved six-finger grip — what will be a rigid connection where forces can only be transmitted axially.

The foglets themselves will not float like water fog, but will instead form a lattice by holding hands in 12 directions — what’s called an octet truss (conceived by Buckminster Fuller in 1956). Because each foglet has a small body compared to its armspread, the telescoping action will provide the dynamics required for the entire fleet to give objects their shape and consistency.

https://gizmodo.com/why-utility-fogs-could-be-the-technology-that-changes-5932880

A swarm of foglets could coalesce into something that looked like Kyle Reese and felt solid to the touch. They could then transform into something like a fluid or dense gas and “flow” around a person standing nearby, though I don’t know if the foglets could exert enough force against that person’s body to hurt them. The swarm could then re-form into Kyle Reese behind them. However, they wouldn’t be able to create a sharp, hard sword that could cut off a T-800’s metal arm: Hall calculated that foglets could only form into objects that are “as tough as balsa wood.” So while foglets could mimic solid objects, they will lack hardness and durability.

Even if foglets can’t “punch” you or turn into swords that can stab you, they’ll still be able to hurt you. Imagine a swarm of foglets in a vapor state enveloping you and then coalescing into a net ensnaring your body. What if they waited for you to breathe some of them in and then those foglets transformed into solids to clog up your lungs? Likewise, they could clog up the internal moving parts of any guns you had, rendering you defenseless.

Links:

1. Progress in “visual question answering”
   https://paperswithcode.com/task/visual-question-answering
2. Progress in “video question answering”
   https://paperswithcode.com/task/video-question-answering
3. An interview with J. Storrs Hall about his “foglets”
   https://gizmodo.com/why-utility-fogs-could-be-the-technology-that-changes-5932880