Reading This Will Prevent the Robot Apocalypse

At some point in the long march of technological progress, we got good enough at making machines that somebody asked: how far can this go? Somewhere between the wheel and the scroll wheel we wondered whether our creations might one day surpass us, and if they did, what would stop them from turning the tables and enslaving us. Or eradicating us completely.

This question, once fascinating, is now banal. Every now and then someone finds a sufficiently thick veneer to coat the idea with to make it seem shiny and new again, but the once philosophically fresh question has been cooked by skilled directors, reduced by mediocre ones, and then microwaved into a blackened trope by Netflix line cooks.

But for all this exploration, for all the fretting about progress and its bad influence cousin, hubris, none of these stories have asked the most interesting question of all:

What if it's already happened?

It's difficult to depict apocalyptic mechanical shenanigans without using time travel, because machines today are pretty dumb. Dumb enough that I wrote that on a machine, you're reading it on one, and I'm completely unworried that either of us will face any reprisal. My monitor is always wearing a blank stare and my keyboard tALks lIke tHiS.

I usually like time travel movies, because I like high-concept movies. I like movies constructed like little narrative pretzels, turning over on themselves, baked in speculation and salted with paradox (I promise this will be the last food analogy). But I also have a preference (though it's closer to a demand) that these movies hold together logically. This is a problem because time travel, particularly into the past, is inherently ridiculous.

The best a time travel story can do, usually, is to handwave away the inherently nonsensical parts of time travel, but establish rigid 'rules' about how it works to constrain things enough that we get a coherent story. And there are really only so many ways to do this. Any story about time travel has to choose which kind of time travel story it's going to be, and it has to choose from a small menu (sorry, I lied). These are the options:

Back to the Future

There is one timeline, which can loop back on itself, and it reflects changing circumstances and probabilities dynamically. When Marty McFly reduces the likelihood of his parents getting together and conceiving him, his hand starts to fade into nothingness. Of all the conceptions of time travel, this one makes the smallest effort to appear scientifically plausible. Why would it fade, rather than cease to be? Isn't his conception binary? Why just his hand? And so on.

Looper

Mostly the same as above, except memories shift as things are happening and any action which causes someone not to exist takes effect immediately (they poof out of existence, rather than fade). Cut off a guy's arm in the past and it's immediately gone in the future. Similar logic, but with a facade of seriousness.

LOST

Whatever happened, happened. Everything will inevitably unfold a certain way, such that even attempts to change the future end up bringing it about. If people travel through time and see a future they don't like, trying to change that future will either fail, or end up causing it. There is no real agency: there is only an immutable fate. This is the posture that Primer takes, too, as well as some of the subplots in the Harry Potter books. This is probably the most intellectually defensible conception of time travel.

Terminator

This one's tricky, because the series has passed through several storytellers' hands, and they clearly don't agree. But in the first entry it's "whatever happened, happened": Kyle Reese goes back in time to save Sarah Connor in order to indirectly save her eventual son, and ends up fathering said son. The whole thing is a not-grand-but-regularfather paradox with no beginning or end, just a möbius striptease of "will they, or will they?"

In Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the rallying cry is "no fate but what we make." Sarah Connor even carves this into a picnic table that the film lingers on later, because the director, James Cameron, doesn't trust you to pick up on anything yourself (machines can be intelligent, but apparently not audiences). The characters' actions are predicated around that idea: their goal in the film's third act is to blow up the facility where the A.I. breakthrough is taking place, an action which only makes sense if they believe they can actually change the future. They grapple with this issue briefly, with one character asking "aren't we changing things ... right now, changing the way it goes?"

In Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Cameron takes his leave of the series, but instead of rebooting things, this film elegantly subverts the previous film's message, siding more with the original: the actions of John, Sarah, and the others turn out to have merely postponed Judgment Day. This is a pretty cool way to reconcile the seemingly conflicting messages of the first two films, even though it leaves us with a very confusing set of facts to turn into a workable model of time travel.

You can make sense of "whatever happened, happened," and you can sort of make sense of the idea that you can change timelines by adopting a multiverse theory of reality. But to say that you can change some things but not others, or small things but not big things, implies that reality itself can differentiate between crucial events in history and relatively unimportant ones, and is bending all human action towards a general outcome. This sounds suspiciously like a mind. It's generally considered a sign of bad storytelling if an otherwise secular yarn gets tangled enough to require God as a character to crochet out of it, and Deus help me if they haven't done it in a series literally about machinas.

Borne Back Ceaselessly Into the Past

However you sort out Terminator's narrative bickering, a pretty obvious question looms: assuming you can change the future by intervening in the past, why stop at John and Sarah Connor? Why not kill Sarah's mother, or grandmother? Why not blow up Ellis Island on the day her ancestor lands on the teeming shore? Maybe we can aim our headcanons at the problem and assume that going back before a certain point endangers elements of the future the machines don't want to change, but I have it on good authority from the Lepidoptera community that even small changes have large effects.

The result of this strategy would be an arms race not of technology, but chronology: the machines target Sarah's mother, so humans go back and save Sarah's mother. In response the machines target her grandmother, and the humans go back to save her instead...and so on and so forth, fighting backwards in time for an inverted eternity. If you want a picture of this future, imagine a reboot stamping on a human face, for ever.

There is no stopping point. Connor is an Irish name, so the moment the machines sent a terminator back in time, the prospect of Arnold Schwarzenegger entering a stone hut and demanding a clansman's kilt and horse became an inevitability.

This is an eschatological staring contest that humans cannot win. Their opponents have an inexhaustible supply of inexhaustible machines, but humanity's remnants are left to capture and refurbish the inferior ones like yesterday's iPads. They'd ultimately have to reach the same conclusion as a different robotic cinematic intelligence, the computer in WarGames:

Humanity would need to adopt a completely asymmetric strategy. We can only succeed by shifting the battleground to a place where we have an advantage. Where do humans have an edge over machines? What are we good at that they're bad at?

Emotion. Empathy. Computers can parse and manufacture endlessly, running around forever in their infinite loops. But they can't tell stories. That's where we have the edge. That's where we can hold F12 and nip the problem in the BIOS: by winning hearts and minds.

Obviously, it wouldn't do to literally send back someone who simply says "hey, I'm from the future, you should watch out for those uppity robots." For one, humanity has a poor track record with conspicuously wise people doing impossible things and claiming to be their savior. For another, you don't want people panicking and starting cell phone bonfires or trying to blow up Cupertino. You need to warn them, but the warning can't be overt or it'll get tuned out as deranged rambling. And it can't come from some self-serious academic or blogger, or it'll come off as a boring PSA.

The warnings have to be interesting enough to be paid attention to, subversive enough not to alarm outright, and emotionally compelling enough that people internalize them as truisms. Does this sound like any art form that you enjoy?

The future remnants of humanity haven't been sending us machine bodyguards. They've been sending us filmmakers. They've been sending us storytellers.

Once again, mankind's salvation lies within the arc.

What would a filmmaker from the future look like? They'd be ahead of the curve, technologically. They wouldn't want to advance the effects industry too much, lest they give themselves away, but they'd certainly expand its boundaries. They'd need the stories they tell to be extremely simple and broadly accessible to reach as many people as possible, which means box office performance would be crucial. And coming from a dystopian future where humanity has nearly destroyed itself, they'd likely contain a strong streak of nihilism.

You probably see where this is going: James Cameron is from the future.

Once you've accepted this, huge swaths of his career start to look different. There are hints both large and small:

• His crowning achievement is Titanic, a film about people exhibiting hubris over their own technological prowess and ignoring warnings of impending doom.
• He made a film called True Lies, about lying to people to protect them before eventually recruiting them to your cause.
• I mentioned his nihilism, which pervades his filmography. It's a level of condescension and disgust for humanity that would be misanthropic and miserable for someone actually born in this time, but luckily for Cameron he's from the moribund future and it's completely understandable.
• The trump card: in the original Director's Cut of The Abyss (IE: Cameron's preferred version), deep-sea creatures conclude the film by warning humanity that it's on track to destroy itself...and they do so by projecting images on a wall-sized screen in front of Ed Harris' character. They literally show people movies to save them from themselves.

Once Cameron had thoroughly established this narrative throughline, his filmography turned to solutions. In Avatar, Jake Sully is a crippled soldier who can walk again thanks to an artificial Na'vi body. It extolls the virtue of this technology, but only when used responsibly, and only when humanity remains in control. The solution, in other words, is keeping people in the driver's seat. Technology being a thing we need to use and inhabit, and not outsource our faculties to. This message is so crucial that after decades of telling us about the problem, he's spent a decade (with another decade apparently on the docket) expanding Avatar into an entire cinematic world.

Now that you know this, you cannot go back to your old life.

But there's nothing to take up arms against, either. All you can do to help is to buy the Terminator box set and stream The Matrix. Hold viewing parties that are actually Save The Human Race parties, unbeknownst to your guests. And, of course, share this essay with as many people as possible.

If you're reading this, you are the resistance.