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Skynet
Definitions
- 1 A family of United Kingdom military communications satellites.
"On returning to Stanmore in 1967 he [the author] was in charge of the development of transportable satellite earth stations Types III and IV for use in the British Skynet defence communications system. He was responsible for the proposal and all the technical concepts for the communications payload of the Skynet II satellite."
- 2 A distributed artificial intelligence system that is aware of the physical world and acts autonomously through cyborgs and computer control systems; (by extension) an uncontrollable AI that threatens humanity.
"In the first two films, Skynet is a colossal piece of hardware, a single unit which contains an artificial intelligence designed to run the US nuclear weapons system, a doomsday computer that becomes aware and destroys humanity. […] It was only through some very fancy footwork that Terminator 2: Judgment Day managed to make it remotely plausible that Skynet had sent a second machine to a later date. Since Skynet is presumably aware of its own origins, this makes the first film marginally less plausible."
Etymology
sky + net. From sky and network. The first satellite, Skynet 1A, was launched on 22 November 1969.
From the Terminator film series, the first of which, The Terminator, premiered in 1984. Coined by Canadian scriptwriter James Cameron, who also directed the first two Terminator films that he had also written.
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