This is not a movie review or a commentary on the ex-governor of California. I think, though, that the Terminator as metaphor is extremely interesting in our post-post-modern consumer driven distopia. Some would say that the Terminator series is just an odd curiosity, super-violent, time-paradox wasteland, designed to distract and entertain, fleece the movie-going public of its hard-earned money. The Terminator series, at least the sequels, are pretty much that–exploitation, but at least the first movie has an interesting premiss about the way we interface with our machines. The success of human development–technology, innovation, progress–is primarily based on how we interact with our machines, how we make our machines better at what they do, and how these machines make our lives better. My personal story starts with analogue telephones and television, transistor radios and not much more. Cars were “analogue” as well, depending not on circuit boards for their time, but mechanical points and rotors. The world, however, driven by rampant capitalism, does not stand still and companies all over the world have fought to improve all of these gadgets. Analogue computers, which were fairly common in the sixties had minimal computing capacities because all analogue data must occupy physical space. In a world of punch cards and reels of magnetic tape, computers never could get very far in terms of speed or computing capacity. With the advent of digital storage, however, combined with miniaturization, computers and micro-computing chips have revolutionized everything about computers and their application in the real world. The hyper-computers of today little resemble the clunky Fortran processors of the seventies. In just one generation we have developed hand-held devices that even forty years ago were unimaginable. Cell phones are not just cell phones. They are complex computing devices that can link up with main frames around the planet to process every kind of information that exists. Now that miniaturization and ultra-fast processors have combined to create small super-computing devices, is the next step a generation of computers that are self-aware? Now, I have never had a computer talk back to me or to give me orders, but there is always a first time for everything. Several other writers, including Ray Bradbury, have already pondered a future in which the machines we use to do our work, take over, rebel, and start to eliminate us as pests. Distopian literature, apocalyptic literature, has always been popular with certain groups, especially in times of social stress and economic downturns as an expression of existential angst, but who doesn’t have a smart phone which is connected to the Web? Who doesn’t have a tablet connected to the Web. The idea of desk top computers, the huge innovation of the 80’s, is almost quaint today, and they are disappearing the way of the Dodo bird. Soon we will be just a mass of routers and wi-fi, wireless digital communication. We haven’t gotten to the Terminator yet, but we are tinkering around with robots, and as the processors become smaller and more efficient, so do the machines that they drive. I wouldn’t dream of warning anyone about the eminent take-over of the machines, but their already ubiquitous nature, their enormous capacity for change and innovation, and their extremely broad application into every area of our lives might suggest that the machines are already here and taken over a broad spectrum of our day-to-day activities. Something to think about, anyway. “It was software, in cyberspace.”