Plot:
In the year 2029, Earth is a dystopian nuclear wasteland where small groups of humans fight a years-long war for survival against a hostile artificial intelligence (AI) named “Skynet.” Originally built by the U.S. military in the 1990s to run defense systems, Skynet became so powerful and complex that, to the surprise of its creators, it achieved true intelligence and free will. It quickly concluded that all humans were a threat to its existence, so it instigated a global nuclear war, killing billions of people outright. In the aftermath, Skynet built its own army of combat robots, and set them loose hunting down and destroying the humans who had survived.
Thanks to the leadership and genius of a general named “John Connor,” the humans managed to turn the war in their favor after several years. In 2029, as human forces closed in on Skynet’s headquarters, the AI used a time machine to send a combat robot–played by Arnold Schwarzenegger–back to 1984, on a mission to kill John Connor’s mother, Sarah. Doing that would eliminate John from the timeline, handing victory to Skynet. The combat robot in question has a humanoid metal body covered in flesh and skin, so it looks like a human, and it is called a “Terminator.”
After destroying Skynet, the victorious human forces seize the time machine and send one of their best soldiers, a man named “Kyle Reese” back to 1984 to stop the Terminator. The film then becomes a race against time as the two agents try to find the unsuspecting, young Sarah Connor.
Analysis:
There will be VTOL aircraft that use tilting turbofans or tilting jet engines. In the post-apocalyptic world of 2029, Skynet uses a variety of killer robots of different shapes and sizes to hunt down the remnants of humankind, including “Aerial Hunter-Killers,” which are large, autonomous aircraft that use either swiveling turbofan engines or swiveling jet engines (I can’t tell by looking at them) for propulsion. To hover, the engines swivel downward to point their exhaust straight at the ground, and to move forward, the engines swivel 90 degrees to point backwards. There are already warplanes that are passingly similar to this, but nothing exactly like the aircraft shown in the film will exist by 2029, or even 2049.
The basic problem with the Aerial Hunter-Killer is that it would gobble up enormous amounts of fuel while in “hover mode,” as illustrated in the graphic below. It would count as a “Lift-fan” aircraft, and its position on the Y-axis shows it would consume three times as much fuel as a helicopter and twice as much power as a tilt-rotor aircraft like a V-22 while hovering. (The X-axis has little to do with this analysis, but for edification, it indicates how fast the lift-generating devices would have to blow air down at the ground to make the aircraft hover. A helicopter blows a broad column of vapor down at the ground at slow speed, while a direct lift aircraft blows a narrow column of vapor down at the ground at high speed.)
An aircraft with a lift-fan propulsion system would be unsuited for the kind of low-altitude hovering and slow forward movement that Skynet used the Aerial Hunter-Killers for. A helicopter or tilt rotor aircraft configured for ground attack would have been a much better choice. I suspect they weren’t chosen for the film because they don’t look futuristic enough.
The closest thing we could have to an Aerial Hunter-Killer in 2029 would be a V-22 Osprey that is armed with forward-facing machine guns and missiles. The armaments are in development now (the V-22 was conceived as a transport aircraft, and adding heavy weapons to it is a new idea) and could be ready by then, giving it the ability to attack ground targets while hovering or at least while flying slowly over the ground. However, the V-22 is designed to be flown by humans and not computers, but something like the Aurora Flight Science drop-in autonomous flight conversion system could someday be installed in the V-22. I doubt the technology will be good enough for low-altitude combat against ground targets by 2029, though 2039 is plausible. The aircraft can carry up to 20,000 lbs of internal cargo,
So yeah. Aerial Hunter-Killers won’t exist by 2029, but by 2039, something that is essentially the same (i.e. – a large, scary, computer-controlled, tilt-engine aircraft that can attack ground targets while flying at very low altitude) could. But again, I don’t think using the tactics shown in The Terminator will make sense, since flying low and slow in a combat zone makes you vulnerable to enemy fire.
Also note that the F-35B fighter plane is in service already and demonstrates that turbofans can be used to hover, albeit inefficiently. But unlike the Aerial Hunter-Killers, the plane’s engine doesn’t swivel. Instead, the rear exhaust nozzle swivels down towards the ground and smaller nozzles under either wing open. As the pilot increases engine power, the turbofan blades spin faster, air is sucked into the front inlets of the plane, and the hot exhaust exits the plane through the three downward nozzles, causing the plane to move in the opposite direction and to hover. The turbofan engine also supplies power to a “lift fan” behind the cockpit, which spins its own fan blades to blow air down at the ground, helping the plane to rise in the air. Hot engine exhaust comes out of the three nozzles, while cold, ambient air blows out of the lift fan.
The F-35B has VTOL so it can take off from small aircraft carriers and remote bases that lack runways. Vertical takeoffs and landings gobble up huge amounts of fuel, so F-35B’s have shorter ranges and can’t carry as many bombs and missiles as their non-VTOL cousins, the F-35A and F-35C. Once an F-35B get airborne, it closes its underwing nozzles, turns off its lift fan, and points its rear exhaust nozzle straight back so it flies just like a normal plane, with lift being efficiently generated by air flowing over its wings. The plane completes its mission in that configuration, and if tasked with destroying a group of enemy soldiers on the ground, it would do a high-speed bombing attack. Even though it could if it wanted to, the F-35B wouldn’t transform back into VTOL flight mode to slowly hover above the group of enemy troops to attack them like an “Aerial Hunter-Killer.”
In defense of the Aerial Hunter-Killer’s plausibility, Skynet had clearly invented some type of extremely energy-dense batteries or mini-reactors, evidenced by the Terminator’s ability to engage in near-continuous physical activity and high-level cognition for days without recharging. If the same technology were incorporated into the aircraft, then fuel inefficiency would be much less of a concern. However, no technological trends suggest that energy sources will be that much better by 2029 or even 2039.
The Aerial Hunter-Killer might also make sense if the humans’ antiaircraft lasers have proven very effective at shooting down aircraft. In real life, this is considered to be one of the roles that military lasers will be best suited for, thanks to their high power, long range and instant speed. They might turn out to be more devastating weapons in that regard than we now assume. High losses might have forced Skynet to build aircraft that fly fast and low to the ground, using speed and the ability to hide behind hills and structures to hinder the enemy’s ability to aim and fire lasers at them before they disappeared from view or had killed the enemy. Flying low and fast, Aerial Hunter-Killers would appear at one end of the horizon and disappear at the other end in a matter of seconds. An inherent problem with laser weapons is that clouds, smoke, and fog can easily block their beams, but the Los Angeles area gets few clouds or fog. (Maybe Skynet uses more conventional robot aircraft against people in London.) I doubt the antiaircraft lasers of 2029 will be so effective that plane tactics and designs will need to be changed to resemble the Aerial Hunter-Killers.
There will be armored vehicles the size of houses. Another kind of fearsome combat robot Skynet uses against humans in 2029 is a ground-based Hunter-Killer Tank. It’s much larger than contemporary tanks, and has a faintly anthropomorphic “mast” or “turret” that has a central sensor cluster and laser cannon “arms” on either side. While scary and surely powerful, I doubt armored vehicles like this will exist in 2029, or for a long time (if ever) afterward.
This screenshot shows that a presumably adult human skull is half the diameter of one of the Hunter-Killer’s suspension wheels. The median distance between the top of an adult’s head and his upper row of teeth is 7.3″. So let’s say that the diameter of one of the suspension wheels is 15″. Using that figure, we can do some basic photo forensics on this picture of a model of the film prop to deduce that the vehicle’s overall length is about 33.4 feet, and it is about 20 feet high at the top of its mast.
The ground-based Hunter-Killer is significantly larger than modern tanks, like the American M1 Abrams, which is 26 feet long (not counting the length of the barrel) and 8 feet high. However, the Hunter-Killer is by no means infeasible to build, as vehicles that are as big or bigger already exist and are robust enough for industrial use.
While there’s been talk in Russia and some Western countries of building enlarged tanks that can wield bigger cannons (150mm+), any such future tanks wouldn’t be nearly as big as the Hunter-Killer tanks. Regardless, considering typical military R&D and procurement timeframes, even if a country were to commit to building a bigger tank right now, it probably wouldn’t be in the field by 2029.
I admit there could be some logic to the Hunter-Killer tank’s design given its mission and operating environment. The wide caterpillar tracks and high ground clearance would enable it to drive over the wreckage-strewn terrain of bombed-out Los Angeles. Having its weapons mounted on a high mast instead of in a traditional, squat turret would give it a bigger firing arc and let it shoot down over urban rubble to zap humans who commonly use it as cover. Since its laser guns don’t produce recoil, the weapons could be mounted high without threat of them tipping over the vehicle when firing. It makes sense to install the vehicle’s sensors on its highest point to give them the widest field of view, and in fact this is established practice in contemporary tank design. The Hunter-Killer tank might also be large because there’s no other way to fit a power source big enough to support the laser guns. Existing laser weapons are major energy hogs.
All of that said, I still don’t think it would make sense to build Hunter-Killer tanks for at least two reasons. First, vehicles that large would also be so heavy that they’d collapse bridges if they tried crossing them, seriously limiting their mobility. The weight would also reduce their fuel efficiency and range. Second, there are cheaper weapons that could do all the same things as Hunter-Killer tanks just as well. For example, the robot tank I described in my other blog entry could, if cheaply modded with a Mark 19 grenade launcher, pose just as much of a threat to human enemies.
My tank’s 125mm main gun and .50 caliber machine gun could kill humans and blow up their cars as well as the Hunter-Killer tank’s laser gun. My tank’s detachable UAV could also feed bird-eye-view footage to my tank from high up in the air, providing better situational awareness than the Hunter-Killer’s mast-mounted sensors, which are a puny 20 feet above the ground. My tank’s grenade launcher could also lob bombs over rubble and other obstacles that my UAV tells me humans are hiding behind, which might be better than the benefit the Hunter-Killer gets from having its guns so high that it can point them at down angles to shoot the same hiding people. My tank would also be a much smaller target, making it harder for the humans to hit, and four or five of my tanks could probably be made for the money and metal that goes into one Hunter-Killer tank. The only advantage the Hunter-Killer might have is better mobility thanks to its bigger caterpillar tracks, but my army could fix this by using armored, robot bulldozers to periodically clear some of Los Angeles’ roads (military engineer units commonly do this sort of thing in combat zones).
There will be laser and/or plasma weapons. Skynet’s Hunter-Killer planes and tanks have advanced weapons that shoot colored rays that inflict thermal damage on their targets. The humanoid Terminator robots and human infantrymen carry smaller versions of these. It’s unclear what principles these weapons operate under, but in the infamous “gun shop scene,” Schwarzenegger asks the clerk for a “phased plasma rifle in the 40 watt range,” indicating that at least some of the future weapons could be firing bolts of plasma. Of course, that doesn’t rule out the possibility that some of the other future weapons could have been laser guns. Laser weapons capable of killing humans with a single shot are already being tested, and will be in service with the U.S. military by 2029, but plasma weapons won’t. In fact, plasma weapons might be inherently impractical to build at any point in the future.
“Plasma” is the fourth state of matter, the others being solid, liquid, and gaseous. Substances generally turn into plasma only at very high temperatures, and in that state, they can be thought of as gases in which the electrons have separated from the positively-charged nucleus of each atom comprising the gas. Stars are giant balls of plasma, and we can use technology to make plasma here on Earth. Plasma torches, for instance, use electricity to superheat gases to the point that they turn into plasma and shoot out of the torches in the form of a bright jet of vapor that is hot enough to melt through metal. If you pressed one of these against a person, it would rapidly burn through their flesh and bone, and could kill them.
The problem is, plasma dissipates very rapidly, and it strongly interacts with the particles in our atmosphere, making it a very short-ranged weapon. Even if it had a massive power source, there’s simply no way that a plasma weapon could be made to fire “bolts” of plasma that would stay coherent for long enough to strike targets 100 feet away, as was shown in the movie’s future combat scenes. (Read this interesting essay for details http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Essays/PlasmaWeapons.html ) This is why the “phased plasma rifle in the 40 watt range” line was nonsensical, and added to the script purely because it was cool-sounding techno jargon. Plasma rifles and cannons just can’t be built.
Laser weapons, on the other hand, are almost ready for frontline military service. Lasers are concentrated beams of light and consist of photons, which, unlike plasma, have no charge. However, a laser is similar in the sense that it damages objects by rapidly heating them up so they catch on fire or melt.
A laser’s destructive potential is determined by the amount of energy it transfers to the target is strikes. The common unit of measurement is Watts, which is the number of Joules of energy transferred in one second. Lasers “in the 40 watt range” are used today for engraving and etching things like customized wooden plaques and tombstones. Shining a 40 watt laser beam on a fixed point on someone’s shirt would cause it to catch on fire in less than five seconds. Doing the same to their exposed skin would cause immediate pain and a second-degree burn. This isn’t a pleasant weapon to have used on you, but it pales in comparison to the destructive potential of a modern firearm.
Lasers capable of causing the sort of instant, catastrophic, explosive damage to human bodies as depicted in the film need to be in the kilowatt (1 kW = 1,000 Watts) power range. In 2014, the U.S. Navy installed a 30 kW laser, creatively named the “Laser Weapons System” (LaWS), on one of its ships for field trials, and the video clips of the firing tests show it inflicts about the same damage on objects as the laser guns on Skynet’s Hunter-Killers did.
The U.S. Navy now plans to install the even more powerful HELIOS lasers (60 kW) on some of its ships for combat use in 2021, for destroying light targets like drone aircraft and speedboats. Even if the deadline slips–which would not be surprising–it’s reasonable to predict that the lasers will be in service by 2029.
There will be handheld laser and/or plasma weapons. In the movie’s future combat scenes, the human soldiers and Terminators use rifle-sized weapons that shoot out beams of colored light and inflict thermal damage on whatever they hit (e.g. – small explosion of sparks and a popping noise). And Schwarzenegger would not have asked for a “phased plasma rifle in the 40 watt range” at the gun shop unless he expected it to be a small arm like the other weapons kept in such a place. Laser guns with the same ammunition capacity and destructive power as those shown in the film will not be rifle-sized by 2029, I doubt they ever will, and even if they could be made someday, I don’t see why anyone would pick them over rifles that shoot out metal bullets.
The first big obstacle to making laser rifles (let alone anything as small as laser pistols) is energy storage. Let’s assume that the laser rifles in the film had power outputs of 1 kW per second, meaning if the rifle shoots a laser beam onto an object for one second, it will have transferred 1 kW of energy into the object. That means the laser must have a power source plugged into its back end that can discharge 1 kW of energy in one second. That’s about the same amount of electricity as a typical American household uses at any given time (i.e. – enough electricity to simultaneously run a central heater or air conditioner, at least one refrigerator, possibly a water heater and stove, and several lights and personal electronic devices). It’s a lot of energy, and it requires a physically large and heavy power source, which militates against the requirement that the weapon be rifle-sized.
It gets worse. No machine is 100% efficient at converting energy input into energy output, so the power source will need to feed the laser more than 1 kW of electricity to make a 1 kW laser beam come out the other end. Most of today’s lasers are only 25 – 30% efficient at converting electricity into laser beams, so our hypothetical laser rifle’s power source would need to be able to discharge enough electricity to power about four American houses at once. Even if we assume that future AIs like Skynet will make breakthroughs in laser technology, raising the energy conversion efficiency to 50%, the weapons would still be energy hogs.
It gets worse. For the laser rifles to be useful and practical, they’ll need to be able to fire many, one-second laser beams from a single “energy clip.” Ideally, the laser rifle and a few extra energy clips would provide the soldier with about 300 shots, which is what an infantryman with a modern, gunpowder assault rifle has, and without weighing much more. The laser rifle’s rate of fire will also need to be reasonably fast, as the weapon will put its user at a fatal disadvantage in combat if it needs 10 seconds or more to “recharge” between shots. So the power source needs to be able to do at least 300, 2 kW electrical discharges, and for there to be no more than, say, five seconds (approximate time for a soldier with a gunpowder rifle to make an aimed shot) between each discharge. The energy storage devices we presently have, such as batteries, supercapacitors and fuel cells, fall badly short of these competing requirements. And even if a material with the necessary energy density demanded by these clips existed, when fully charged, it would be so volatile that it would explode like a stick of dynamite if slightly damaged. The clips might be more useful as grenades.
It gets worse. Remember when we agreed that our laser rifle has a generous 50% efficiency level thanks to future technology invented by Skynet, so that if we put 2 kW of electricity in one end a 1 kW laser beam comes out the other end? Well, the 1 kW of electricity that is “lost” inside the weapon doesn’t simply disappear; thanks to the Law of Conservation of Energy most of it is converted into waste heat. This would rapidly heat up the whole laser rifle until it would burn the skin of the person holding it (this would also make the user very visible to anyone on the battlefield with thermal sights). This problem can be mitigated with metal radiators and with heavy-duty cooling systems that circulate water and blow air around the lasers (the “laser tube” gets the hottest, but the weapon’s energy clips would also get hot because they’d be rapidly discharging electricity), but they add major cost and bulk to the whole weapon system, and can’t be miniaturized to rifle-size.
But even assuming that all of these technical problems were solved, why would anyone choose a laser rifle over an assault rifle that shoots out bullets? In the film’s future battle scenes, it doesn’t look like Skynet’s fighting machines would have been less effective if armed with low-tech bullets, tank shells, and mortars. After all, the humans had no armored vehicles and seemed to be wearing floppy cloth uniforms that bullets would have penetrated. Building gigantic war machines armed with complicated laser weapons seems like a resource allocation mistake that a highly logical AI like Skynet wouldn’t make. Even if very advanced laser weapons are invented someday, I think bullets, missiles, and bombs will retain important advantages, and will be preferred for many common needs.
Let me conclude this topic by saying that, while rifle-sized 1 kW lasers will probably never enter common use, 40 watt lasers that Schwarzenegger could have been referencing might. Getting hit with a one-second long beam from a 40 watt laser wouldn’t kill you, but it would permanently blind you if it hit your eyes. And as I said earlier, if the beam were focused on your shirt for a few seconds, it would light it on fire, causing you to panic and start flailing around. Within a few decades, I can imagine a laser weapon the size of a large rifle, firing lasers in the range of 40 watts, being technically feasible. If paired with a rapid, precise targeting system (such as a humanoid combat robot that can aim weapons better than a human soldier), it could be used to silently “snipe” unsuspecting soldiers up to a half mile away, to blind enemy pilots in low-flying aircraft, and to fry the sensors on enemy vehicles and missiles at the same ranges. The Geneva Conventions forbid laser weapons that blind people because they are too inhumane, but it’s always possible that the Conventions might be revoked in the future, or that humanity could find itself warring with a machine opponent like Skynet that never agreed to them in the first place.
Also there are two types of lasers: 1) continuous beam lasers and 2) pulsed beam lasers. The first type continuously emits photons, producing a long, unbroken laser beam. The second switches on and off very rapidly, producing many short laser beams that follow the same path. The switching happens so fast (a pulsed laser can produce thousands or millions of short beams in a second) that it looks like one, unbroken beam to human eyes, so we can’t see the difference between the two types of lasers.
Therefore, while Schwarzenegger’s request for a “phased plasma rifle in the 40 watt range” made no sense, asking for a “PULSED LASER rifle in the 40 watt range” would have used correct terminology and have referred to a plausible type of weapon. I’m going to email James Cameron so he can do a Director’s re-release of the film.
Two-thirds of the way through the film, Kyle Reese has a flashback to an incident where a Terminator infiltrated an underground human base and used an energy weapon to kill many people. Though the weapon is bulkier and longer than most rifles, it could still be deemed a “rifle.” Something that looks like a sling is visible coming out of the back of it. Replace that with a power cord that is connected to a backpack containing batteries and a heat radiator, and the entire system would fairly resemble a 40-watt laser weapon that could be built within a few decades.
Why make small numbers of big Hunter-Killer attack vehicles that the humans can easily see and keep track of, instead of large numbers of small-to-medium-sized Hunter-Killers that the humans would struggle to keep track of? Dog-like robots that could quietly roam the wasteland and crawl inside all the collapsed buildings and sewer holes and use integral assault rifles to shoot humans they found would be devastating weapons, and hundreds of them could probably be made for the price of one Hunter-Killer tank.
Some robots will be indistinguishable from humans. Unlike the Hunter-Killers, which are general-purpose combat vehicles meant to fight humans in open terrain, the Terminators are specialized for infiltration of underground human bases. They are made to look externally identical to people so they can gain entry, and once inside, they use small arms to kill people. As I said in my review of the movie Prometheus, I think machines like this will exist by the year 2100, and quite possibly a few years before that. They will be able to pass for human, even under close-range visual inspection, thanks to fake, non-organic skin and hair. Androids like this won’t exist by 2029 for a variety of reasons.
Some robots will have organic parts. When Kyle Reese first tells Sarah Connor that
Schwarzenegger is actually a “T-800” robot, he explains that the earlier “600 series” of robots were easy to spot because they had fake-looking rubber skin. The T-800s have layers of real human muscle, skin, hair, and other tissue around their metal skeletons, making them look identical to humans. Kyle Reese explains that the human tissue is grown in cloning labs and then grafted onto the metal robot bodies. As I said in my most recent Future Predictions blog entry, I don’t think therapeutic cloning technology will be advanced enough to make whole human organs and large amounts of tissue (like muscles and skin) until the 2050s.
More time will be needed to figure out how to graft cloned human biomass onto metal robots and to keep the biomass nourished and healthy. Consider that, if you grow a large flap of skin in a lab and surgically graft it onto the body of a human burn victim, then the new skin links with the person’s blood vessels, nervous systems, and immune system, which keep the patch of new skin fed with oxygen and calories and protected from infections. But if you graft that same flap of skin onto the metal frame of a robot, there’s no organic support system for it at all, so it will die and rot away.
There are two solutions to this problem, both of which require very advanced technology that we’ll have to wait long after 2050 to have: 1) Genetically engineer the tissue so that biological functions normally done by specialized human organs are instead done by patches of the tissue. For example, red blood cells are made inside of human bones, but since a T-800 would only have metal bones, then the T-800’s muscle cells would need to be genetically modified to also make red blood cells. The resulting tissue would look human to the naked eye, but would have so many DNA modifications that it wouldn’t be genetically “human.” 2) Include artificial organs in the T-800s metal frame that interface with the exterior layers of human tissue, and perform the support functions normally done by biological organs. For example, the T-800 could have an artificial heart made of metal and plastic, connected to the blood vessels of its human tissue. The artificial organ would pump blood through the tissue, just like an organic heart would.
While making a robot that is “living tissue over a metal endoskeleton” will be possible someday, it won’t happen by 2029, and I don’t think it will be necessary if the goal is to design an android that looks externally identical to humans. Given what’s already possible with hyperrealistic sculptures, synthetic materials like silicone should be able to mimic the look and feel of human tissue and skin in the future.
Some robots will be bullet-proof. Schwarzenegger’s metal robot body is nearly immune to every bullet that hits him, including those from a shotgun absorbed during a shootout in a dance club, and others from an M-16 fired into his back at close range at a police station. However, he is not completely impervious to damage, as we see during a gruesome “self-repair” scene where he uses hand tools to fix his forearm after it was hit by a shotgun blast, and late in the film when being run over by a truck hurts his leg, and then a stick of dynamite blows him in half. We can already make robots with this level of damage resistance today, and I am sure that future combat robots will have at least this much armor.
Schwarzenegger’s damage threshold is the same as that provided by Level 4 body armor, which typically takes the form of a heavy ceramic plate that a soldier slides into an oversized “pocket” covering the front of his bullet proof vest. A common, 1/2 inch thick steel plate provides the same level of protection at lower cost but more weight, and I’m sure there are many metal alloys that as strong as the previous two, but lighter. It would be entirely possible to build a human-sized robot now that had integrated Level 4 armor, particularly if weight were saved by incorporating that armor into only the robot’s most vital parts, which in the T-800 were the torso and skull. Making robots like this will only get easier as stronger, more lightweight alloys are discovered, or as cheaper ways are found to make today’s armor alloys.
Giving your combat robots enough armor to resist the most common guns makes clear military sense, and it would force your enemies to adopt bigger weapons that would be so heavy for humans to carry and too hard for us to shoot. For example, the commonest type of .50 caliber machine gun, the M2, weighs 83 lbs and can’t be effectively fired unless it is attached to a tripod that weighs 50 lbs. The bullets are also heavy, so you’d need at least four human soldiers to drag the gun around on a wagon/wheeled tripod just to operate one gun. Fifty caliber sniper rifles and shoulder-launched rockets could work and could be operated by one person apiece, but they’re hard to aim at T-800-sized targets and have slow rates of fire. So Terminator’s prediction that there will someday be human-sized combat robots with integral Level 4 armor is accurate.
This underscores why we SHOULDN’T build armor into non-combat robots. If our robot butlers and maids turn against us someday, we’ll want to be able to easily destroy them with common handguns and axes.
On a tangent, let me say that the bullet-proof T-800 represents only one design philosophy for combat robots meant to kill human infantry. Another approach is to make combat robots that lack armor, but which are just as survivable because they move too fast for humans to shoot them (think of small, low-altitude UAVs) or because they can effectively hide from humans (e.g. – have advanced camouflage features, or are designed for highly accurate, long-distance sniping fire from far away or from high altitude). Another approach would be to make cheaper, more expendable combat robots that would be more vulnerable to human weapons, and to tolerate their higher loss rates because they would killed more humans overall for a smaller investment of money.
Some robots will have superhuman strength. Schwarzenegger displays superhuman levels of strength from the beginning of the film, when he punches a man’s chest so hard that his hand penetrates into his torso, and then emerges gripping the man’s disconnected heart. In another scene, he uses one hand to casually grab a large man standing at a phone booth and throw him several feet away. Many industrial robots and even small machines have superhuman levels of strength, so this prediction has already come true.
Whenever we start building human-sized combat robots, at least some of them will have limbs that will be much stronger than humans’. For example, a grown human man with very strong hands could grip an object with 150 lbs of force, but a small, cordless cable cutter whose blades are like short fingers can clamp down on objects with 3,000 lbs of force. It would make sense to build very strong combat robots, principally so they could carry big weapons and manipulate their surroundings better. Improved hand-to-hand combat abilities against humans would be an ancillary benefit since that type of battlefield fighting will be even rarer in the future than it is now.
And again, this should underscore why we SHOULDN’T make our non-combat robots super-strong. For various safety reasons, I don’t think we should design our robot butlers and maids to be stronger, faster, or heavier than average humans. The vast majority of domestic tasks we’d assign to non-combat servant robots could be done under these limitations, and in cases where something couldn’t, one or two extra robots could be rented to help.
Some combat robots will be humanoid. The T-800 is humanoid in form, meaning it has the same body layout as a human and is the same overall size (height, width). I think some future combat robots will be humanoid, but most won’t because other body layouts and sizes will be better for most combat roles.
First, remember that the T-800 was not the only type of combat robot made by Skynet–it also fielded Hunter Killer tanks and aircraft. By virtue of larger size, they could carry bigger, more powerful weapons than the T-800s, and seemed to be the weapons of choice for “surface” combat. The T-800s were made humanoid so they could do special infiltration missions into underground human bases. No clue is given about the size and composition of Skynet’s robot army, but it’s possible that the T-800s represent only a small fraction of its forces, and that most of its robots are Hunter-Killers, or are of some other, non-humanoid design not shown in the film (note that spider-like combat robots were nearly used in Terminator 2‘s future scenes, and killer snake robots were in the fourth film). This is a detail that is important but easily overlooked, and it will prove accurate: after the world’s militaries have switched to using robots for combat, only a minority of those robots will be humanoid.
Many combat robots will look almost the same as war machines we have today: Autonomous planes will still have at least one engine for propulsion and two wings so they can use lift, autonomous ships will still be oblong and pointy at the front end to minimize friction with the water, and autonomous armored vehicles will still have two sets of wheels and some kind of gun turret on top (see my blog post about a hypothetical robot tank). The only visual differences between those future weapons and their contemporary counterparts might be slightly smaller dimensions and the deletion of cockpits and structural bulges since there won’t need to be big interior spaces for humans (though they would need to have some number of small robots for field maintenance and repair, as I also described in the robot tank blog post). If Skynet were actually created and if it built a robot army to fight humanity, most of its aircraft, ships, and land vehicles would look very familiar to us.
Those sorts of combat robots would excel at destroying our heavy weapons, vehicles, and structures, but it would be wasteful to use them to hunt down small groups of humans armed only with light weapons, which describes the people living in The Terminator‘s post apocalyptic future. Moreover, robot tanks, fighter planes, and ships can’t go inside structures, sewer tunnels, or thickly wooded areas. Smaller combat robots of different designs would be needed to efficiently fight human infantry, particularly in the environments I’ve listed.
Would these robots be humanoid, like the T-800? Maybe. For sure, they would need to have bodies that were narrow and short enough to fit through standard-sized doorways or between trees in a dense forest, and light enough to not collapse floors when they walked over them. They would need to be able to fit themselves into tight spaces that humans can, like small caves and basement crawlspaces. They would also need legs–not wheels or caterpillar tracks–so they could go up and down stairs, operate pedals commonly found in human-driven cars, hop over fallen tree trunks and climb steep hills and ridges. They would also need hands so they could manipulate and use things in built human environments, like doorknobs, keys, and push-buttons. Being able to hold and use weapons, tools, keyboards, and other things designed around human hands would be very useful, as the robot would be finding such objects all the time.
Those design requirements might sound like they add up to a robot that must be humanoid, but it’s not at all the case. The requirements could be met by a robot that had a centaur-like body (four legs is more stable than two, anyway), or that lacked a head and instead had prehensile stalks coming out of its neck with cameras and microphones on their ends (a head makes a body top-heavy and packs too much important stuff in one place), or that had four arms, or four tentacles with hands on their ends (more arms means you can do and hold more stuff at once). Its hands might have four or eight fingers apiece, and it might be five feet tall but three feet wide, or seven feet tall and 18 inches wide. It could have a shiny, metal exterior that looks totally inhuman, or could be intentionally made to look scary to humans, perhaps like something from a horror movie. While robots like this wouldn’t be able to blend in with humans and “walk past the sentry,” they could go inside all the houses, vehicles, tunnels, and other places humans could go, and kill us wherever they found us.
I can only think of two types of military missions for which a human-looking combat robot would be well-suited: 1) assassinations and 2) infiltration/spying. Given that, during wartime, only a small fraction of military operations are of such a character, it follows that only a concordantly small fraction of any military’s robots would look human. Also, since stealth is important, the humanoid robots would mostly be made to look as boring as possible, perhaps like a middle-aged woman, a child, an old man, or an average soldier. Making them eye-catching by giving them Schwarzenegger’s bodybuilder physique or by making them handsome/pretty, would be counterproductive in most cases.
Even in the narrow use cases we’ve whittled our way down to, I think other types of robots and weapons would be better than using humanoid robots. By virtue of their smaller size, robots made to look like insects and small animals could infiltrate human spaces more easily than a man-sized robot. Many of them could also be built for the price of one T-800, and having more means higher odds of one successfully completing its spy mission. A “robot rat” could also assassinate people by injecting them with poison, releasing lethal gas, or jumping on the target’s face and activating an internal explosive. Even something as small as a robotic mosquito could kill, by injecting poison into the target’s bloodstream with its stinger (note that a single drop of botulinum toxin can kill several men). It would be impossible for humans to stay constantly vigilant against threats so insidious. An even cheaper solution would be bombs full of heavier-than-air poison gas.
So in conclusion, I think it’s possible that some combat robots will look like humans, but they will be used for rare special missions (and this was accurately portrayed in the movie), and the vast majority of combat robots will look totally different. In the very long run, I don’t think any of them will look human.
There will be fully automated factories. Kyle Reese reveals that the T-800 robots are made in fully automated factories run by Skynet. As I said in my review of I, Robot, all factory jobs will inevitably be taken over by machines, so it’s just a question of how long it will take. I predicted that a handful of such factories would exist by 2035–principally as technology demonstrators or for a tech billionaire like Elon Musk to claim bragging rights–but it would take decades longer for them to become common. I doubt they will exist as early as 2029.
The common refrain that goes something like: “Human workers will always be needed, because without us, who would build or fix the robots?” is actually false and illogical. The fact that we haven’t yet invented robots that can build other robots without human help doesn’t imply that it will remain that way forever, or that humans have some special, creative quality that can never be transplanted to machines. John von Neumann, who one of the greatest minds of the 20th century and a pioneer in computer science, theorized in his paper “The General and Logical Theory of Automata” that sufficiently advanced artificial life forms (machines) could make copies of themselves, including copies that were engineered to be better, and that there was no reason why humans would always be needed to build, fix, or improve the machines. We can be totally cut out of the loop, and I predict someday we will.
There’s no theoretical reason why the entire production chain of making a robot as complex as a T-800–from digging the raw metals out of the ground, refining them, forging and shaping them into body parts, assembling the parts, and transporting the finished product to its place of use–can’t be 100% automated someday. I conservatively predict that most manufactured goods will come from automated factories by 2100.
Robots will be able to fix themselves. As I mentioned before, after sustaining damage to lightly armored parts of his robot body, Schwarzenegger does repair surgery on himself, using a small knife and a pair of pliers. Machines won’t be capable of this level of self-repair by 2029, but thanks to the factors I listed in the previous paragraph, they will inevitably gain the ability. The ability to build something implies an ability to repair it as well. Someday, robots will be able to fix each other and to fix themselves.
I note that full self-repair abilities will require the robot in question to be able to see and touch every spot on its own body, which in turn makes some design features necessary. It’s arms would need to be long and double-jointed, and if it had eyes set in a head like humans, then the head would need to be able to swivel 360 degrees to it could look at damage to its back. It wasn’t clear if the T-800 had these features. Other ways to solve this problem might be to give it long, telescoping tentacles in place of a head, with cameras at the ends of each (this would also make it much less risky to “peek” around a corner in combat to see if any bad guys were there). The tentacles could bend in various ways to give the robot a clear view of any part of its body, from nearly any angle. Having small cameras built into fingers and feet would accomplish the same thing. The ability to detach body parts would also be very useful, as it would let robots work on their damaged parts more easily, and because it would let them quickly swap out their parts for functional new ones if any were at hand.
Again, I conservatively predict that non-trivial numbers of robots will have sophisticated self-repair and “peer repair” abilities by 2100.
Robots will be able to keep working in spite of massive damage. At the end of the film, the T-800 played by Schwarzenegger is blown in half by a stick of dynamite that Kyle Reese shoves into the bottom of its exposed rib cage. In spite of this catastrophic injury, the T-800 keeps fighting, using its hands to drag the functional upper half of its body along the floor so it can get to get to Sarah Connor and manually kill her. Some robots are already this resilient, and robots made in the future–particularly those designed for combat–will be even more so.
So long as a robot’s power source and main computer are intact and connected to each other, it will keep working, even if all other parts of its body are nonfunctional. The inability to feel pain and a lack of a circulatory system allows robots to survive major injuries like the loss of limbs that would incapacitate humans due to psychological shock, pain, and blood loss. In 2016, police in Dallas, TX used a remote-controlled robot to kill a criminal who had shot several of their comrades and barricaded himself in a building. The robot had a bomb grasped in its hand, maneuvered close to the criminal, and then the device detonated, killing the suspect. Though the robot’s arm was blown off by the explosion, the machine remained functional, and was repairable after the incident.
In the future, I think it might be advantageous for each major robot body part or body segment to have its own computer, sensors, and power supply. That way, if a part were severed, it could still function for a while independently. For instance, if a T-800 had its arm severed, then the arm’s internal computer would switch on, would be able to see its surroundings via tiny cameras in the fingertips and knuckles, and would be able to drag itself around like a spider or like “Thing” from The Addams Family. It could drag itself to the robot body it was formerly attached to, or crawl away to find help. Though this might sound macabre and useless, note that many insects, including the highly evolved and successful cockroach species, have distributed nervous systems that grant their body segments similar abilities. They wouldn’t have evolved that way unless it was useful somehow. Additionally, under normal conditions, it would probably benefit a robot to distribute its computation and power load across multiple nodes in its body, and having sensors in all its extremities and body parts could only boost its utility.
Machines will be able to do near-perfect imitations of human voices. At two points in the film, the T-800 accurately impersonates the voices of humans to fool people who are listening via radio or telephone. In recent years, deep learning algorithms have become extremely good at this (see the recently released recording of a machine impersonating Joe Rogan’s voice), and at the rate of quality improvement, I think the machine imitations will sound flawless to us by 2029.
However, there is one important inaccuracy in the film: The T-800 is able to imitate humans after hearing them speak only a few words. Today’s deep learning algorithms need to listen to many hours of someone’s recorded speech to understand how they speak well enough to copy their voice, and the requirement for large sets of training data will still exist in 2029.
Links:
- https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/aurora-demonstrates-fully-autonomous-helicopter-300570907.html
- https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a26948/the-military-wants-a-flying-anti-missile-laser-again/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_head
- https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a26898213/navy-laser-weapon-destroyer/
- https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/capabilities/directed-energy/laser-weapon-systems.html
- https://youtu.be/cQx5pFI_M44
- https://www.navyrecognition.com/index.php/news/defence-news/2019/march/6954-us-navy-to-arm-its-destroyers-with-helios-laser-weapons-by-2021.html
- http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/sidearmenergy.php
- https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3
- https://www.rp-photonics.com/wall_plug_efficiency.html
- https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1039&context=extension_families_pubs
- https://www.grainger.com/product/53JJ15
- http://www.muehlenbein.org/Mue06t.pdf
- https://www.bostonglobe.com/2016/07/11/dallasrobot/wxKshDTWf7yPjBxxNkeKiO/story.html
- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-cockroach-can-live-without-head/?redirect=1
- https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/597yba/ai-generated-fake-joe-rogan-voice-dessa