Research Article

References to the Terminator franchise have become an ever-present feature of the public debates on AWS within the US. In his highly influential book Army of None for instance, Paul Scharre estimates that “in nine out of every ten serious conversations on autonomous weapons [he has] had, whether in the bowels of the Pentagon or the halls of the United Nations, someone invariably mentions the Terminator”. References to the Terminator franchise have regularly featured in the “rhetorical repertoires” used by policymakers to communicate the challenges and opportunities associated with military uses of AI to the American public. In these and other ways, the T-800 Terminator by Arnold Schwarzenegger has become a “poster boy for any debate on lethal autonomous weapons”.

In many instances, references to the Terminator are used to draw attention to the fears associated with intelligent machines overthrowing and seeking to destroy their human creators. Speaking at the United Nations in 2019 for instance, the then United Kingdom Prime Minister Boris Johnson asked whether advances in AI technologies would culminate in “[h]elpful robots washing and caring for an aging population? Or pink-eyed Terminators sent back from the future to cull the human race?”. The risks of an inadvertent “machine uprising” alluded to in Johnson’s remarks are a central subtext of these films. Following its activation by the US military to help manage its strategic defence against the Soviet Union, the “defense network computer” Skynet is depicted orchestrating a global nuclear war which kills nearly half of humanity.

As argued in an article I co-authored with Ingvild Bode and published in Cooperation and Conflict, the Terminator franchise features multiple different stories about intelligent machines that communicate a radically different understanding of what constitutes appropriate uses of AI in the military domain. These include the visions that align with director James Cameron’s description of the titular Terminator to Arnold Schwarzenegger as a “[…] machine. It’s not good, it’s not evil. If you play it in an interesting way, you can turn it into a heroic figure that people admire because of what its capable of”.

In the case of the second and most critically acclaimed film in the franchise Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a “Good Terminator” which protects the human heroes from physical harm, enacts the commands of human decisionmakers and uses force with superhuman levels of accuracy. This imaginary of machine guardians is politically significant as it appears to have mirrored key aspects of the US’ regulatory position on AWS at the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons where these technologies have been the subject of discussion since 2014.

A more detailed consideration of the stories told about intelligent machines in this franchise also creates the analytical space to revisit the film critic’s Janet Maslin 1984 description of the Terminator as being “a monster movie”. In a recent article in Critical Studies on Security, I reexamined whether the machine superintelligence Skynet is the only ‘monster’ depicted in The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Drawing from Bruno Latour’s reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, I argue that responsibility for the nuclear Judgement Day presented in these films lies not only with the machine superintelligence Skynet but also with the human policymakers who designed, activated, and subsequently abandoned the system. At a time when the risks associated with integrating AI technologies in nuclear command, control and communications systems are inviting greater debate, the stories told about intelligent machines in the Terminator franchise thus serve another important political function. They invite policymakers to reflect on whether they risk becoming the very ‘human monsters’ they are seeking to deter.