Hasta La Gadget!

When I interviewed Wired for War author PW Singer last March, he told me that the preconditions for a successful Terminator-type uprising are not in place. As computer development accelerates, however, those preconditions become way more possible.

So, what are the preconditions, according to Singer?

1. The AI or robot has to have some sense of self-preservation and ambition, to want power or fear the loss of power.

2. The robots have to have eliminated any dependence on humans.

3. Humans have to have omitted failsafe controls, so there’s no ability to turn robots or AI off.

4. The robots need to gain these advantages in a way that takes humans by surprise.

At the moment, says Singer, these conditions do not exist. “In the Terminator movies, Skynet gets super intelligence, figures the humans are going to eventually shut it down, thinks, ‘I better strike first.'” However, in today’s army, “we’re building robots specifically to go off and get killed.” He adds, “No one is building them to have a survival instinct—they’re actually building them to have the exact opposite.”

As far as human dependence, robots may do more and more human dirty work, but robots still need the meatbags to handle their dirty laundry. “The Global Hawk drone may be able to take off on its own, fly on its own, but it still needs someone to put that gasoline in there.” Still, it’s not hard to see how this precondition could eventually be overcome.

The failsafe discussion is surprisingly two sided. “It seems rather odd that people who grew up watching Terminator in the movie theaters wouldn’t think, ‘Hmm, maybe we should have a turn-off switch on there.'” But on the other hand, “brilliant AI could just figure a way around it.” Besides, “we don’t want to make the failsafe all that easy, because we don’t want a robot that comes up to Bin Laden that he can just shut off by reaching around the back and hitting the switch.”

We of course assume that robots will never gain the element of surprise. “You don’t get super-intelligent robots without first having semi-super-intelligent robots, and so on. At each one of these stages, someone would push back.” The scary thing is, Singer does acknowledge that the exponential growth of super-smart machines may indeed catch us by surprise eventually. “By the end it’s happening too quickly for people to see.”

No matter what preconditions are prevented deliberately, there is a point on every futurist’s timeline where computers become “smarter” than humans, in terms of sheer brain capability, and no matter what happens up till that point, the game then changes completely. “In the Terminator movies, Skynet both tricks and coerces people into doing its bidding.” How do we stop that from happening?

“Some people say, ‘Let’s just not work on these systems. If they’re so many things coming out of this that are potentially dangerous, why don’t we just stop?'” says Singer. “We could do that, as long as we also stop war, capitalism and the human instinct for science and invention.” [More from my interview with PW Singer]

Machines Behaving Deadly: A week exploring the sometimes difficult relationship between man and technology.

Surveyor makes open source robot controllers that have quite a fan following among do-it-yourself drone enthusiasts. The company’s core product is the SRV-1, a  programmable mobile robot controller that is open source,wireless and video enabled.

Peter Dove, UK-based developer, has created a nifty way to control the Surveyor SRV-1 module’s camera and the base using a Nintendo DS game console. Dove used the SRV-1 console’s built-in WiFi link to remotely control the motorized robot base and view pictures and video transmitted by the robot. And as the video shows the buttons on the DS’s console work perfectly for the purpose.

The attempt is similar to how some enthusiasts had used the Google Android G1 phone to control a robotic blimp.

For detailed binaries and source code on how Dove brings together the DS and the Surveyor moduel, check out his blog.

Humans are fragile. Our bodies are easily mutilated by our own creations: Crushed, mulched, zipped. But physical force is weak and inefficient compared to good old electrocution, which, according to MythBusters’ Adam Savage, doesn’t kill you the way you think it does.

If you learned about how electrocution kills you from cartoons or Ernest P. Worrell—you get fried as your body flashes like fireworks and everybody can see your bones—well, you got learned wrong. Electricity doesn’t actually fry you—that actually requires way more juice than it takes to kill you, which is a frighteningly minuscule amount.

But before we get to the scary part, let’s get through the technical part, so we’re on all the same page of scariness. You’ve got a few major units when it comes to electricity: Volts relate voltage, amperes (amps) describe the current, watts measure power and ohms refer to resistance. A pretty good analogy from HowStuffWorks relates the basic differences between them, plumbing style: Voltage is like water pressure, current (amps) is like the flow rate, and resistance (ohms) is like the size of the pipe. Increasing the voltage results in a greater current (more amps)—assuming a constant resistance-since increasing the pressure logically increases flow [Update: Clarified this sentence]. Power (wattage) is simply the voltage multiplied by the current (amps). One amp is equal to about 6.242 × 10^18 electrons per second moving through a point. And a single watt is equivalent to one joule of energy per second, but that doesn’t matter so much for our purposes.

Alright, now let’s get real. And who’s more real and had more opportunity to get electrocuted than Adam Savage from MythBusters? So we called and asked him just how much electricity you need to kill a human. His reply? “I’m about to freak you out.”

Seven milliamps. For three seconds. That’s all it takes. Electricity kills you by interrupting your heart rhythm. If 7 milliamps reaches your heart continuously for three seconds, “your heart goes arrhythmic,” he explained. Then everything else starts shutting down. “You could quite easily kill someone with a 9-volt or AAA battery directly to the heart.”

The reason electricity isn’t able to murder millions of people a day with ultra-tiny shocks is that our bodies have built-in resistance against electricity, so it doesn’t shoot straight to our heart. The skin’s resistance is about 5,000 to 15,000 ohms. Adam said that “it’s super difficult to quantify” precisely how much juice you need to break through, since there’s all kinds of variables in play, like the clothes you’re wearing. Not to mention, “how do you quantify that someone’s actually died?”

But if it’s any consolation, Adam says that the kind of static shock that actually stings your skin is about 20,000 volts—high voltage, just a really tiny amperage.

So the trick is getting the proper amount of power to cut through our skin and clothes and rubber-soled shoes to zap our heart. There’s a reliable way to do that: Lightning. With lightning, Adam said, “all bets are off.” A lightning bolt can hit over a billion volts. Air’s resistance, he explained, is about 10,000 volts per centimeter—so for electricity to move just 10cm through air requires 100,000 volts.

Machines could generate lightning artificially—this dude Charles Steinmetz built a lightning machine back in 1916 that generated over 10,000 amps and 100,000 volts. The reason some people survive is that they luck out with the path it takes through their body—so they might get scorched if it travels along the outside of their body, like if you’re wet, but if their heart goes untouched, they could come out alive.

That’s obviously wildly impractical—the sophistication and energy required for lightning-shooting machines would be more easily put toward acquiring nukes, a la every apocalyptic movie ever. Besides, there are far simpler machines that do a similar job when it comes to electrocuting people. Simple skin-penetrating Tasers already kill people occasionally. However, according to Adam, Tasers are designed with the 3-second-kill problem in mind—most pulse at much shorter intervals to avoid being fatal.

Still, we likely have little to fear from extinction by electrocution. With the exception of the admittedly clumsy electric chair, no one’s ever systematically killed people with electricity. Machines, if they were to develop a murderous intent, would most likely use all of the other ways humans have designed to kill each other.

Huge thanks to Adam Savage from MythBusters for helping us—or the machines?—out!

Still something you still wanna know? Send any questions about why I’ll never recover from Terminator: Salvation, electrifying puns or the pancake apocalypse to tips@gizmodo.com, with “Giz Explains” in the subject line.

My childhood was active enough. I was as fearless as any toddler. I frolicked in the mud and climbed on now-banned metal jungle gyms. I was rambunctious. Then I met the pajamas with the feet.

At first I remember loving the idea. Those PJs were unassuming, but warm. Comforting. The itchy brown fabric was completely tolerable because it offered me spacesuit-like cocoon protection against those cold New England winters.

The gloriously padded feet sported rubber bottoms that provided me with just the right amount of grip for taking hairpin turns at the bottom of the foyer stairs and into the family room. Indeed, where socks would have sent me tumbling into the family’s ancient grandfather clock near the front door, these pajamas caught firmly, and allowed me to perform running maneuvers around the house that were the envy of my less fortunate and less pajama-fied best friends. I trusted that clothing absolutely and completely. In hindsight, such naivety was probably my downfall.

You see, I was young. The contraption on the front of these pajamas was alien to me. The zipper. I didn’t “get” it or how it managed to take two separate pieces of fabric and join them together. So, my mom had to help me get dressed.

At first, the arrangement was uneventful. Mom would hold up the pajamas with the feet like a NASA technician, and I would jump into them, eager to get it all over with so I could bolt down the stairs and orbit around the house at close to 10 mph. But before that, I would have to turn 180 degrees so mom could lock me in by pulling up the zipper. This is how things went for the first few months of winter. Jump in, turn, zip up, run away. Safe and sound.

But then one day, as I vaulted into those welcoming PJs with the feet, something was different. Perhaps mom had a bad day at the office. Or maybe it was the fact that it gets dark at 4 p.m. in Massachusetts during the winter, and she was depressed. I have no idea. Whatever it was, it had distracted mom to the point where she wasn’t taking into account all the variables in the task she was about to perform.

Son in PJs yet? Check.
Turn to face me? Check.
Grasp zipper? Check.
Execute zipper pull? Go for launch.

Missing in that checklist, of course, was any mention of my penis or its location at the time.

Now, before we get to the part that sends roughly 60% of Gizmodo’s audience into a pathetic fetal position, a brief aside. Many of you might think calling a mere zipper a “machine” is as big a stretch as any, but to that I say you’ve definitely never experienced what I, Ben Stiller’s character in There’s Something About Mary, or millions of other unfortunate men have experienced throughout history since the invention of the blasted zipper. Or you’re lying about having a penis.

Whatever your story is, I deliver this aside about “the machines” because, believe me, I’d take a run in with a T-600—flayed skin and personality disorder and all—over another run-in with that zipper any day of the week. Those teeth. That unforgiving gnashing sound as the mechanism slowly grated its way northward toward my junk. The muffled, organic yank the zipper made as it bit into my flesh. The Pinch. The—

Oh, I’m terribly sorry. I seem to have fallen out of my chair.

Anyway, to this day, some 20+ years later, I still subconsciously think of this story when I put on a pair of jeans, or do up a pair of slacks. Button flies are a godsend, in my opinion, and I was forever a changed man after that day. A little more tentative; a little more cautious. Especially with you know what.

Everything works fine now, I assure you, but those feeted pajamas went into the garbage that day so fast the plastic bag melted against the can. My mood at the time was the antithesis of that final scene from Terminator 2. Whereas John Connor wept, my relief at seeing that damned invention heading into oblivion was palpable.

The big bag of ice felt pretty damn good too.

Machines Behaving Deadly: A week exploring the sometimes difficult relationship between man and technology.

In the future, if you’re walking around and encounter a Terminator, do not run.

Shout its model name at the top of your lungs “Teee EIGHT HUNDRED!!!” or “MOTO-TERMINATOR!!”, then run. That way the kiddies back in 2009 can Google for the proper toy.

The Terminator franchise has always been inherently ridiculous. We’re talking about killer robots that travel through time—without guns or clothes, of course—to not only destroy John Connor, leader of the Resistance, but take out his mom. (Destroying his mom’s mom, mom’s mom’s mom or anything along these genealogical lines would have been easier, but a bit too far-fetched.)

And that’s exactly my point. Our favorite, ridiculous franchises regularly walk precariously across that deep valley of ludicrousness, but instead of taking its chances on the tight rope like Star Trek did, Terminator Salvation double flips over the chasm on a motorcycle.

We’re talking 20-story robots that can creep up behind you without so much as a peep and supporting characters who nonchalantly demonstrate super heroic bodily feats without anyone ever asking “WTF?”

There are two story lines going on here. One, of John Connor, aka Batman. Seriously, he sounds just like Batman. Actually, he sounds like Batman for only the first few scenes of the film. Later, in scenes that, according to storyboards I saw during my set visit, were added after renegotiating with Bale for a bigger part, he sounds, you know, somewhat well-adjusted. It’s too bad that much of Bale’s own subplot, a yarn in which Connor painstakingly develops a frequency to deactivate Skynet killbots, is ended in unfulfilling resolution.

The other story is of Marcus. NOW THIS PART WILL BE A SPOILER IF YOU HAVEN’T WATCHED THE COMMERCIALS. BUT BECAUSE I ASSUME YOU WATCH COMMERCIALS, I’M NOT GOING TO FEEL TOO BAD FOR SAYING IT.

Marcus is a Terminator. Oh my God!

The problem with the movie is that too much of the story is of Marcus. The other problem of the movie is that too much of the story is of Marcus hopping from unexciting chase scene to unexciting chase scene. It’s a two-hour video game linking a series of sequences that have little reason for existence other than McG’s action-packed directing style.

And not action-packed like Charlie’s Angels. It’s a lot more like the so less charming, so less self-aware Charlie’s Angels 2: Full Throttle.

Sure, the sacred tome of Terminator 2 could also be regarded as a montage of chase scenes, but each chase scene forced you to hold your breath. In Terminator Salvation, a giant, Transformers-esque robot chases after a tow truck full of people. Then it deploys motorcycle Terminators. There are several cuts. Then the tow truck spins in such a way that its winch strikes one of the Terminators like a wrecking ball. On a bridge. There is also jet involvement.

Remember in T2, when the good old semi chased that kid on a motorbike? Man that was great.

The thing is, only…2/3 of Terminator Salvation is this depressing. When the Marcus and Connor storylines finally converge in a mad dash to blow Skynet away, the film hones in on what made the original movie and T2 great: The good old-fashioned Terminators, not new merchandizing opportunities or high octane thrill rides.

In this last act, we see Connor properly grown up, exploiting his full potential as a soldier/hacker who strikes the ideal equilibrium of previously mentioned ludicrousness. We see Marcus, while not a character we particularly care about, to be of a particularly interesting and justified existence. (Incidentally, Sam Worthington doesn’t play the role poorly. It’s the script/editing that lets him down.) And there’s a cameo that’s probably worth the price of the ticket alone. Scratch that, it is worth the price of the ticket alone.

Somewhere, deep inside, Terminator Salvation may be a good film. But it’s so unabashedly Hollywood, such a construct of too many artistic styles, storylines, chase scenes, contracts and heavy-handed metaphors—not to mention terrible script writing—that it may have simply forgotten how to be good. Quite simply, it’s just too busy being a movie to be entertaining.

T3 was a lousy film, but at least its fatalistic ending stuck with you. At the end of Terminator Salvation, I left the theater gagging on the world’s most expensive Hallmark card, questioning why I was supposed to give a damn in the first place.

For more on Terminator Salvation, read about our set visit.