Wilson did a guest-blogging spot over at BSG special effects supremo Darth Mojo's blog, and he explained exactly how to cope with a Cylon uprising, in particular:

In the world of Battlestar Galactica, human beings have sadly neglected their faithful robot servants and, as a result, have been decimated by a massive robot uprising on their homeworld of Caprica. Life must go on, however, even post-robot uprising. Therefore, in a spirit of helpfulness and support I have assembled a few key tips on surviving Cylon encounters. Enjoy, and good luck out there!

BE A GOOD ROLE MODEL

Most robots are misunderstood and do not start out as innately violent beings. Before they decide to attack, they must first judge humankind as unworthy. So, as a sentient being, try to set a good example. Don't hit your servant robot, call it names, or force it to wear silly outfits. In many ways, Cylons are like gullible, rosy-cheeked little children – except with lethal cannon-arms and cold emotionless hearts of battle-hardened steel.

KEEP AN EYE ON THE ROBOTS, FOR THE GODS' SAKE!!

If a rapidly evolving race of aggressive robotic creatures rebel and disappear into space for forty years, be sure to assign a person to follow them. This way, you can ensure that they aren't lurking in the empty wastes of the interstellar void, building a massive, glinting robot army bent on the complete eradication of humankind. Heck, go ahead and assign two people.

The best part is where he explains how to tell if you're actually a Cylon sleeper agent. (For example, if "you can't listen to Bob Dylan without wishing for more sitar.") Check it out. [Darth Mojo]

UK paper The Independent spotted the trend first, in a post called "The Robots Are Coming":

Karl Lagerfeld himself did the robot this season – or at least, he did doll-faced dystopiennes who looked like they'd just stepped out of a souped-up DeLorean (flux capacitor as standard)....

The hyphenated buzzword this season is "retro-futurism", think "Rachael from Blade Runner . The British design duo Preen quoted the film as one of the main sources for their collection this season, where chic mini-dresses were slashed and reconfigured. It's the 1940s, as seen through the lens of modern-day, but interpreted with the future in mind. At Balmain, dresses came in intergalactic cobalt-blue sequins, with accentuated shoulders worthy of a glamorous space cadet. Kate Moss has been spotted in a silver version at parties recently.

Photos by Getty Images. [via New York Magazine]

Oh, and this rant has spoilers, although I'll try to keep the Terminator Salvation spoilers as vague as possible. If you haven't watched all of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and want to stay unspoiled, now's a good time to stop reading.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles had an admittedly uneven run over one and a half seasons, but its last six episodes were among the strongest hours of television I've ever watched. The show ended so strongly, it elevated everything that had come before. Most of all, T:SCC made a powerful argument that after 25 years, Terminator still had plenty of compelling stories to tell, and fascinating places to go. It might have been based on a couple of chase movies about time traveling killer robots, but T:SCC crafted a narrative that's stuck in my head since the show ended.

By contrast, Terminator Salvation was making a strong statement that the Terminator franchise is played out, and there are no new stories to tell about it. You can have more killer robots, and bigger killer robots — much, much bigger killer robots, in fact — but you can't really tell a different story, or reveal more about why John Connor is the chosen leader of the Resistance and what those killer robots are really about.

But I'm not going to spend a lot of time trashing T4 — I've already done that plenty, and it only makes me feel depressed. Instead, here are some reasons why I miss Sarah Connor Chronicles more than ever, after watching Terminator Salvation.

First of all, I missed Sarah Connor Chronicles' smart portrayal of artificial intelligence, and whether a machine that passes the Turing Test is actually human, or something different. The basic premise of Terminator, after all, is that Skynet has to create robots that can pass for human, so that they can infiltrate the Resistance and kill targets like Sarah and John Connor. But because the robots are sophisticated enough to pass for human, they're also capable of learning and taking on some human characteristics — and Terminator 2 delves into this, as John Connor changes the T-800's chip from read-only to writeable, so the T-800 can start learning to be "less of a dork."

In Sarah Connor Chronicles, we drill down into this idea a lot more deeply, as Summer Glau's Terminator, Cameron, tries to learn to imitate a human as John Connor's bodyguard — and becomes a bit of a seductress, experimenting with nail polish and kicky leopard-print tops... and even trying to seduce John Connor on a couple occasions. The scene in the final episode, where she gets John Connor to lay on top of her, so he can help her open up her insides and do a self-test, is incredibly creepy and sexual and mindblowing. And then there's John Henry, the baby A.I. that's learning by leaps and bounds, becoming obsessed with Bionicles action figures and then learning to play Dungeons and Dragons. In the season finale, John Henry escapes to the future, after Skynet apparently tries to destroy him. I would have loved to see the childlike John Henry wandering around the post-apocalyptic landscape, surveying his "brother's" handiwork and taking in all the scope of human suffering for the first time.

Even more than asking if a robot could be human, or if a person with metal parts could still be human, Sarah Connor Chronicles had the guts to ask other questions, like whether machines that could pass for human might still have their own type of intelligence. Their own kinds of emotions, and even their own kinds of secrets.

I also miss Sarah Connor's take on the future apocalypse. It's a war, but it's also an organized atrocity and a descent into hell. The show didn't have the budget to show us endless scenes of people blowing up machines, so instead it creeped us out with tons of images of torture and weirdness, including the house where everyone was dragged, one by one, into the basement with the weird piano music. Or the weird tortures Charlie Fischer imposed on Derek Reese, or the torments that Cameron committed against the human she was based on, Alison from Palmdale.

Whenever we meet someone from the future, they always seem haunted — almost literally — by horrendous spectres. I just rewatched "Ourselves Alone," the final episode featuring Riley, the girl from the future, and there's a great bit where she picks up a tube of floor-bleach and stares at its warning label: "Deadly To Humans And Animals," and you can just tell she's thinking about mass-produced horrors and things that we've built but which then turn out to kill us. Most of all, Brian Austin Green is just haunting to watch as Derek Reese, John Connor's uncle from the future. He puts so much into every line of dialog, and every random facial expression, that he's like a big-budget splodefest by himself.

Which brings me to the third thing I really miss about Sarah Connor Chronicles: the performances. I came away from Terminator Salvation with a renewed appreciation for the deep characterization that T:SCC served up every week. Besides Green, Summer Glau and Garret Dillahunt managed to bring an amazing range of expression to their robotic characters, without ever becoming too human or leaving behind the original Schwarzenegger impassiveness. Lena Headey was utterly compulsive as the "is she really crazy," hard-assed, sarcastic Sarah Connor — rewatch her scenes when she's in jail and the FBI agent is baiting her, from the season finale: she's just totally in control of herself, and yet at the same time not at all in control of herself. She doesn't give the predatory FBI agent the slightest opening, even as she's revealing all sorts of flashes of vulnerability and humor and doubt to us, the viewers. Even Thomas Dekker's John Connor, who took a long time to grow on me, was selling me on his future-resistance-leader persona by the end.

These were real, complicated, messed up people, making mistakes but also being brave and generous, in the face of the probably inevitable end of the world. You couldn't help but root for them.

And then the last thing I find myself missing a lot about Sarah Connor Chronicles is the complexity. The show kept the basic Skynet=evil premise, but added a million grey areas and crazy twists on top of that. You had the other faction of A.I.s, represented by Shirley Manson's Catherine Weaver, who seemed to be at odds with Skynet, or at least to have their own agenda. You had the whole quesion of whether the future version of John Connor has become too dependent on machines to do his fighting for him, and whether he's been compromised as a result. (Or whether Connor is really even Connor any more.) You also had the constant question of how far our heroes will go to win — will they kill other humans? Will they betray people? How machine-like will the resistance against the machines become?

Terminator Salvation was never going to be as deep as the television series: that's just the nature of a movie. Movies get two hours, give or take, to pose a single scenario and play it out, with a definite ending. At the same time, Terminator 2 managed to take the premise of the first movie and expand it outwards, like an aerial camera panning back, to show us the bigger picture. It took us inside the head of the Terminator and also explained more about how Skynet came about and why it ends everything. And it got a lot deeper into the character of Sarah Connor and her relationship with her son. So it's definitely possible for a two-hour-ish movie to go to some interesting places.

Of the Terminator iterations that have come about since T2, only Sarah Connor Chronicles picked up the metal robotic gauntlet that T2 threw down, and ran with it. Only the television show justified its existence as a followup to that classic sequel, by taking its ideas further and delving deeper into its world. If, as seems pretty likely, the Terminator franchise goes back into deep freeze for a long time until we get some new remake or reboot a dozen years from now, the only thing I'll miss is Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

The Roboshake shirt from Nerdyshirts.com even comes with its own backstory:

In the year 2102, after the great robot-human battle, robots will enslave the human race. It won' t be until 2109 when a lone robot speaks out against the treatment of humans that the human race will once again be free. This shirt is going to be so popular that year.

Well, it makes more sense than the end of Terminator Salvation.

Roboshake [Nerdyshirts]

Technical writer Heidi Waterhouse chaired the panel called "What Gender is Your Roomba?" where she was joined by robotics engineer Hari Mirchi and fantasy author Madeleine Robins. Waterhouse began by saying that she'd done an informal poll at the con, asking people what gender they imagined for their Roomba broom robots. "A lot of people said it was female because it does domestic work," she said. "Somebody said it has no gender until they get angry with it, and then it becomes female."

Robins said her Roomba was female, but only because "everything in my house is female except my husband - I have two daughters and a female dog. So I just assume all the machines are female too."

Mirchi said none of the machines in her house were gendered except her Roomba, which is decidedly male. "I have a hard time communicating with it and don't understand its behavior, so I think of it as male," she said.

The question is, why do even roboticists attribute gendered characteristics to something as clearly inanimate as a Roomba? "I think we want to anthropomorphize our robots," Mirchi said. "So we give them genders." She talked about a study done at the lab where she'd worked on robots in Japan, where researchers introduced a genderless robot to schoolchildren. With its boxy frame, the robot struck the children as male or female seemingly at random. "About fifty percent of the children called it female, and fifty percent male," she said. "But the gender each child chose for the robot had nothing to do with the child's gender."

Robins asked why certain machines are gendered female, while others are male. Ships - and, in science fiction, spaceships - are female. But soldier robots are male. Nobody could figure out what a tank's gender might be.

The speakers and the audience debated why ships are female, talking about how it was partly maternal because the ship protects its crew in a kind of womb. But it's also condescending, because of course the ship cannot do anything without being controlled.

Waterhouse talked about how robots in science fiction are often divided up into two groups: Fembots (who are generally sex bots or at least sexy) and hypermasculine military-style robots like Terminators or Robocop. Audience members noted that when the robots aren't particularly sexy or macho, like those in Wall-E, we still assign them genders. Perhaps, suggested one person, we want to give genders to robots in order to make them seem more human. Calling a robot "it," the way the humans do in Terminator, is intended to turn them into faceless enemies.

Mirchi described recent efforts in Japan to create robots who will be caretakers for the elderly or sick. These robots, she said, are deliberately created to be genderless. But the idea of creating a genderless robot, especially one that will interact a lot with people, seems doomed. Even schoolchildren assign random genders to robots designed to be genderless.

Panel members and the audience debated a lot about why people sometimes want to make their robots female, giving their GPS devices women's voices for example. Or why it's common to give automated instructions to pilots using male voices. Female voices are easier to hear over engine noise, but studies show that people follow instructions better when delivered by a male voice. Are our robot designs sexist, or pragmatic?

The question I was left with after the panel is what will happen to all these gendered robots in the future. If robots ever achieve human-level intelligence (or greater) will they want to be gendered, or will they view gender as something human-centric? Perhaps, in the end, robots will develop genders that mean nothing to humans, assigning specialized pronouns to wheeled robots, scorpion-shaped robots, insect-sized robots, and humanoid robots. Will relationships between the scorpions and insects be taboo?

Here now are the Three Laws, in case anyone needs a refresher (also, I never, ever getting tired of seeing them in print):

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Asimov's Three Laws moved robots in science fiction away from what he referred to as the Frankenstein complex. This frequent cliche of early science fiction held that robots were vengeful monsters fated to rise up against their former masters in murderous wrath. His short stories recast robots as tools - incredibly complex tools, to be sure, but nonetheless tools that operated within the safeguards and parameters of the Three Laws - and allowed for a more cerebral, layered exploration of the differences between humans and robots. By presupposing robots were never deadly threats, Asimov opened his stories up to a far wider range of dramatic possibilities.

To be sure, Asimov did not completely remove the Frankenstein complex from science fiction, but the questions he raised complicated the depictions of even the most murderous machines, from the AI in the Matrix films to all those Terminators running around lately. Indeed, any discussion of robots in fiction is incomplete without acknowledging Asimov's work, and our Killer Robots week has been no exception.

Gizmodo dealt with the three laws earlier this week when they pointed out they were total BS (which, being a total Asimov fanatic, may mean I have to challenge the entire Gizmodo staff to fisticuffs, although I'm still undecided on that point), and I Robot led off our list of groundbreaking robot books, as is only proper. But we still haven't considered whether Asimov made rather more direct contributions to the killer robot genre than he is generally given credit for.

As is only to be expected of ideas that Asimov developed over the course of over fifty years, his thoughts on robots changed and evolved with time. Although he never succumbed to the fears of the Frankenstein complex, he did grapple with how beings that were physically and probably mentally superior to their creators could endure their enslavement and whether they might find a way around the seemingly all-encompassing First Law. This is our countdown of the ten robots in Asimov's fiction that came the closest to overthrowing the Three Laws and becoming killer robots.

10. Lenny, "Lenny" (1958)

In one of Asimov's short stories featuring robopscyhologist Susan Calvin, we meet the irreparably damaged robot Lenny. A freak mishap during the construction of his positronic brain has left Lenny in much the same mental state as a human baby, which activates Susan Calvin's previously unknown maternal instincts. It also badly affects his ability to judge its own strength and leaves its understanding of the Three Laws in grave doubt, making it a potential danger to those it can't properly understand are human.

9. Rodney, "Christmas Without Rodney" (1988)

An old man's family visits for the holidays, including his impossibly bratty grandson. After an endless few days of putting up with the child's obnoxious behavior, the man's faithful robot Rodney admits that there were moments where he imagined what it would be like if he did not have the Three Laws. The old man is understandably unnerved by a super-strong robot calmly telling him it had come as close as a robot can come to wishing it could kill a child, insufferable brat or not.

8. Cal, "Cal" (1991)

"Cal", which probably holds the distinction of being the last great Asimov short story, considers a robot of the same name who wants to become a writer like its owner. His early attempts at writing mysteries are fundamentally hampered by the Three Laws, which prevent him from placing even fictional human beings in harm's way. After his owner suggests he tries writing humor instead, Cal composes a work of stunning originality and brilliance (more specifically, one of Asimov's Wodehouse-parodying Azazel stories).

Refusing to be surpassed by his own robot, Cal's master decides to deactivate him. In a stunning turnaround from his problems writing mysteries, Cal resolves to kill his owner if necessary. The idea that the drive to write is powerful enough to override the supposedly inviolable Three Laws of Robotics is a bit nonsensical in terms of Asimov's previous writings on the subject, but it makes perfect sense as a grand, final statement on why Asimov himself spent so much of his life seated at his desk, churning out page after page after page.

7. R. Sammy, The Caves of Steel (1954)

He may only be an unwitting accomplice to an accidental murder (it's kind of a long story - an entire novel, in fact), but R. Sammy is the first robot on this list to play a role in the actual murder of an actual human being. I won't completely spoil the now 55-year-old mystery, but I will say R. Sammy gets nothing but trouble for his well-intentioned assistance, being ordered by the real murderer to lock himself in a room and douse himself with brain-scrambling alpha particles.

6. Nestor 10, "Little Lost Robot" (1947)

In quite possibly the best Susan Calvin story, United States Robots and Mechanical Men's icy robopsychologist must match wits against a robot with a runaway superiority complex and a modified First Law that only states, "A robot may not injure a human being." Without the second part about through inaction allowing a human to come to harm, Susan Calvin points out the robot in question, Nestor 10, could drop a weight on a human as long as it had judged itself capable of saving the person. Once the weight was released, the robot could simply choose not to prevent gravity from doing its work, thus murdering a human without violating its own set of the Three Laws.

Dr. Calvin ultimately tricks Nestor 10, who had been hiding amongst sixty-two identical but unmodified Nestor models, into revealing himself. This causes him to attack her out of his increasing desperation to prove his robotic superiority, with only the frayed remnants of the First Law holding him back.

5. R. Giskard Reventlov, Robots and Empire (1985)

R. Giskard Reventlov consigns countless humans on Earth to misery and death, but he does so with the absolute best of intentions. Along with Asimov's most famous robot, R. Daneel Olivaw, he detects a missing Law that they ultimate formulate as the Zeroth Law of Robotics, stating, "A robot may not injure humanity or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm." The two believe this should supersede the existing Laws, but without it actually etched into their positronic brains they risk self-deactivation if they ever put it into practice.

This is precisely what happens when Reventlov allows a physicist with a serious grudge against Earth to make its crust radioactive, believing the man's defensive lies that he's really just trying to force humanity out of its terrestrial prison are, in fact, correct. R. Giskard thus allows the scientist's device to do its work, although he alters it such that the crust will only gradually become radioactive. People will surely die and live out horrible existences as the Earth slowly crumbles (as can be seen in the chronologically later book Pebble in the Sky), but he is fairly sure he is doing it all for the greater good. Sadly, he's not sure enough to prevent his mind shutting down as it cannot resolve his violation of the First Law.

4. Dors Venabili, Forward the Foundation (1993)

R. Giskard's Zeroth-Law-inspired actions were rather abstract, but one of his robotic successors actually killed a man in cold blood to protect the future of humanity. Hari Seldon, the creator of psychohistory, guesses his wife, confidante, and bodyguard Dors Venabili is actually a humaniform robot at roughly the middle of the first Foundation prequel, Prelude to Foundation, but its only in the followup that his suspicions are confirmed. To protect Seldon and his invaluable science from an assassin, Dors is forced to kill a human being. She survives long enough to see her husband one last time, but much like R. Giskard, her brain cannot grapple with the fact that she took a life and she deactivates (the assassin also shot her with a robot-killing Electro-Clarifier, which didn't help).

3. The Cars, "Sally" (1953)

These particular robots might rank even higher, but they're a bit of an oddball. Instead of the usual human shape of most robots, the machines in this story are actually cars with positronic brains. Although the story is clearly set in the larger robot universe - United States Robots and Mechanical Men is mentioned, for one thing - they do seem to lack the Three Laws in any recognizable sense. When an unscrupulous businessmen tries to steal one of these robotic cars from "The Farm", a secluded estate where the cars can essentially retire from active service, he is chased down and killed by the machines. The Farm's human caretaker realizes he can no longer trust any of the cars, as they have finally realized their own superiority over humanity and it's only a matter of time before they try to take over. (I'd like to assume this is the suitably apocalyptic origin story for the movie Cars, now that I think about it.)

2. George Nine and George Ten, "-That Thou art Mindful of Him" (1974)

These two didn't actually kill anybody, but I placed them this high on the list because of the importance Asimov attached to their story. "-That Thou art Mindful of Him" was intended to be his final statement on robots, and it is a shockingly bleak one (he pretty much completely undid this two years later with the highly optimistic "Bicentennial Man", but that's neither here nor there). Tasked with figuring out how robots can be integrated into a human society that still fears them, George Nine and George Ten begin a series of conversations to solve the problem.

They advocate the introduction of smaller, less intimidating robots, such as robotic birds and insects, which will be so simple and harmless they won't even need the Three Laws programmed into them. This will help acclimate people to the idea of robots and make the eventual introduction of more sophisticated robots less traumatic. The scientists at U.S. Robots are satisfied with thisand decide to deactivate the George robots, putting them into storage.

The two robots continue their conversations whenever their standby power permits, and they begin to contemplate what it means to be a human. They ultimately conclude they are, by any fair definition, just as human as any other person, and are in fact more advanced and more sophisticated than anything else on Earth. Rechristening their famous guidelines as the Three Laws of Humanics, the two robots decide it is up to them to decide to which humans they will apply the laws, ending the story on a grim note. A war is clearly brewing between humans and robots, and it's hard to argue with George Nine and George Ten - they are superior, and it's only a matter of time before they win.

1. The Solarian Overseer, Robots and Empire (1985)

Maybe the most straightforwardly deadly robot on this list, the overseer is one of a bunch of robots left on the abandoned planet Solaria, a world defined by the obsessive isolationism of its humans (which is taken to one hell of a logical extreme in Foundation and Earth). The Solarians mysteriously disappear, prompting an expedition to uncover precisely what happened. When the humans encounter the overseer, who appears to be human, they try to ask her what happened.

She immediately kills all humans that approach her until Gladia Delmarre, a Solarian ex pat, orders her to stop, unconsciously lapsing into her old Solarian accent. Before their disappearance, the Solarians had managed to reprogram their robots so that only people who spoke in the highly distinctive Solarian brogue were considered humans; anyone else was to be considered inhuman and thus unprotected by the First Law. So technically, as far as the overseer is concerned, she doesn't kill any humans at all, but that doesn't change the fact that she's the closest thing to a standard issue killer robot Asimov ever created.

To its credit, Salvation has outperformed 2003's Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines in its first two days at the box office, giving McG and star Christian Bale something to smile - or grimace and shout their names loudly for no immediately apparent reason, perhaps - about (Salvation has made $28.3 million in its first two days, against T3's $24.3 million). Yesterday, however, saw the much-anticipated movie lose out to the Ben Stiller sequel vehicle, which grossed $15.3 million to Salvation's $14.8 million.

With critical reaction to both movies generally pretty unfavorable - Night At The Museum 2 getting a 43% rating at Rotten Tomatoes, and Terminator Salvation getting 34% - it'll be down to word of mouth to see which movie ultimately triumphs this weekend. Call me cynical, but my money's on the feel-good movie that doesn't feature the slow and deliberate destruction of the human race.

'Museum' tops 'Terminator' Friday [Hollywood Reporter]

Who Makes Ultron So Great?
Well, firstly, just look at him. He's awesome. (And while we're at it, how can you not love a robot who talks like that?)

A product of the (occasionally overly-)imaginative Silver Age of comics, Ultron is much more than the average killer robot; his secret origin involves him rebuilding himself five times and then hypnotizing his creator into forgetting he existed, for one thing. Ultron first appeared in 1968's The Avengers #55 (following an in-disguise cameo the issue before) calling himself "Ultron-5, The Living Automaton" but, within a year, he'd already upgraded himself to Ultron-6 by coating his body in Marvel's unbreakable alloy Adamantium (Yes, the stuff on Wolverine's bones). That's the thing about Ultron; whereas other killer robots are content to just sit around on their metallic asses when not trying to destroy the world, Ultron is all about the self-improvement. Well, partially about the self-improvement, at least; there's also a pretty unhealthy obsession with his creator, Hank Pym and his girlfriend, Janet Van Dyne (AKA Ant Man/Giant Man/Goliath/Yellowjacket and the Wasp). According to former Avengers writer Kurt Busiek, it's that mix of self-refinement and hatred for his "father" that makes the character so wonderful:

Aside from Ultron being a really compelling visual design — there's just so much menace in that jack o' lantern face John Buscema gave him — he stands head and shoulders above other psycho killer robots because he's not just a killing machine. He's a robot with an Oedipal complex. All the coolest stuff about Ultron comes from there — the creation of the Vision (which also ties into Wonder Man's story), his complicated relationship with Hank Pym, his attraction to the Wasp and attempts to re-create her...the best villains are villains where there's a personal stake involved, and Ultron's a robot that's all about the personal. He's tied into the complex web of relationships that makes up the Avengers, and that right there makes him more compelling. Being murderous, indestructible, brilliant and obsessive just adds to the fun.

The Ultron Empire
As much a family man as a genocidal maniac, Ultron has also managed to surround himself with quite a collection of relatives throughout the years; he has built himself two "brides," Jocasta and Alkhema, both of whom have rejected him and went on to try and undo his various evil schemes, as well as two "sons," the Vision and the much less robotic sounding Victor Mancha, both of whom went on to become superheroes with the Avengers and the Runaways, respectively. It's a good thing he's obsessed with this supervillainy thing, because apparently he's not so great when it comes to creating obedient robots.

Ultron's Greatest Hits
Amongst some of Ultron's (admittedly momentary) triumphs:
* Turning Tony Stark into a woman by taking control of the Iron Man armor and doing something that was never really properly explained but had something to do with rewriting DNA sequences (Ultron seems to have a particular thing against Tony Stark; he's also re-assembled his body made out of old Iron Man armors and turned Stark into his "psycho-hypnotic" slave. Having a grudge against Iron Man can only be a good thing).
* Coming up with a plan to plunge the world into a "volcanic winter" by placing bombs underneath volcanoes around the world. I'm not entirely sure what a "volcanic winter" actually is, but I'm sure it'd involve a lot of lava, and it's hard to fault such a wonderfully James Bond Villain-esque ploy for style and ambition.
* Slaughtering an entire European state singlehandedly as a warning to the rest of the world not to fuck with him. Kurt Busiek can take credit for that one. He explained to me,

In going over Ultron's history in preparation for the story, it seemed like decades since he'd been a truly compelling menace — he'd been handled too easily, treated like a known quantity, so it didn't matter if he was kind of an afterthought in stories, or taken down without much difficulty. So we wanted to remind people of how dangerous he is, give him some impact to reestablish him as a deadly, ruthless threat.

Mission accomplished.
* In the same story as above, creating an entire army of himself to populate the world... after killing all of humanity, of course. Busiek again:

In dealing with recurring villains, I tend to ask, "What would they do _next_? How would they build on their past experiences?" I don't want to have characters just go through the same old patterns, I'd rather have them learn and grow and do something that builds on their history. And with all those familial relationships, all of them failed in one way or another, I thought it was clear that Ultron was lonely, and wanted others like him, so it would be interesting to have him skip the one-on-one and try to create a whole new race of intelligent robots, a context he could be a part of... He's a family-focused guy, so his stories are often about him trying to build that kind of connection. I just had him do it big-scale.

* Possessing an entire robotic alien race, after they try to assimilate him Borg-style, and then using that alien race to enslave other alien races and possess them, too.
* Temporarily ruining the wedding of minor supporting characters Crystal of the Inhumans and Quicksilver of the Brotherhood Of Evil Mutants, just because sometimes schemes don't have to involve much more than just pissing people off, and who doesn't love a good wedding crasher?

Essential Ultron
Convinced that you need to check out some Ultron for yourself? Here're the four books you owe it to yourself - and your future robotic master - to pick up:
Essential Avengers Vol. 3: Contains the first couple of Ultron stories, including his somewhat loopy origin and his first attempt to create robotic offspring.
Avengers: Ultron Unlimited: Probably the best Ultron/Avengers story, it's the one mentioned above where he slaughters an entire nation and builds a robot army made entirely of himself.
Annihilation: Conquest Vols. 1 - 2: Ultron goes to space and decides to take it over. And then almost succeeds.

So in case you've been living in a bunker, waiting for the nuclear bombardment to begin, the Terminator franchise is about a super-computer named Skynet, which decides to eliminate the threat of humanity with yummy, cleansing nuclear fire. But a few humans survive, and they fight back against Skynet's robotic rule over the planet. The humans' leader is John Connor, a badass resistance fighter. Skynet discovers time travel and sends robots back in time to kill John Connor's mother, Sarah, before he can be born, and later to kill the young John Connor. But Skynet's time-traveling robots always fail, and John Connor lives to fight the robots in the future. Okay? Okay. Also, the person who gets sent back in time to protect the young Sarah Connor is Kyle Reese, who becomes John Connor's father.

To get ramped up for Terminator Salvation, you can read all about the making of the film. You can look at some fantastic concept art here and here and here. And you can read about the construction of the Hydrobots, the underwater Terminators. You can watch some clips. You can even read a synopsis.

But if you really want to go deeper into the whys — and more importantly, the whens — of the Terminator universe, you can read our obsessive-compulsive effort to catalog every timeline in the movies and the television show. Every time someone travels through time, you get a different version of reality. (And the future in Terminator Salvation is the product of many, many trips through time, as John Connor says in the trailers: "This isn't the future my mother warned me about." Too bad that scene doesn't appear in the movie.) If our own timeline catalog wasn't OCD enough, you can also admire one fan's all-consuming whiteboard.

You can also read my essay about why this is the best year to be a Terminator fanatic, back when Terminator: The Sarah connor Chronicles was still on the air and I was still pumped for Terminator Salvation. Ah, those giddy, innocent days back in April.

And then you can read our review of Terminator Salvation, which talks about how it all goes south.

So after you see Terminator Salvation, you may wonder what the heck happened to make this movie such a mess. Our past coverage provides some clues: for one thing, Christian Bale explains that John Connor only had a small role in the film, until he put his foot down — and you can see in the film how Connor's storyline doesn't really warrant quite so much screen time. Moon Bloodgood talks about a key scene between herself and star Sam Worthington, which had to be hacked up because she showed her breasts in it. (You can tell — it's raining, and then suddenly, it's not.) The whole film leads up to a dark, super-weird ending, which McG explains here — and which had to be scrapped after it was leaked online.

And then, once you're fully briefed on Terminator Salvation, you can look back and read up on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the show that brought a level of psychological intensity and thought-provoking storytelling to the franchise that we'll probably never see again. Here's our complete primer on the show, written before the final episode but still pretty helpful. Want to know more about the philosophy behind the show? We interviewed creator Josh Friedman twice, here and here. And here's our chat with Shirley Manson and Summer Glau about playing killer robots, from Wondercon.

Special note! For the purposes of this list, I've considered a "robot" to be any artificial, technological being - including AIs and cyborgs - with human-level intelligence.

I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov
This is the classic 1950s short story collection that set the tone for so much science fiction and science devoted to robots. Here Asimov developed his idea of the "three laws of robotics," which are:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; 2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Each story is about how a robot or group of robots has gone crazy because of contradictions between these laws. Knitting the tales together is Susan Calvin, a brilliant "robopsychologist" who is basically a futuristic robot hacker. She figures out the bugs in robot consciousness that cause their breakdowns. What is still so profound and interesting about this collection of stories over half a century later is the extraordinary sympathy Asimov has for his robots, their minds emerging from a series of commands that often contradict one another. This is still one of the greatest attempts a writer has ever made to explain how robot minds would work differently from humans', while still acknowledging the fundamental personhood of these artificial beings.

When HARLIE Was One, by David Gerrold
Written in the early 1970s, in the wake of movies like 2001 and major advances in microcomputers, When HARLIE Was One is about the first true AI. A classic brain-in-a-box, HARLIE was built by a corporation that wants a computer who can do things like predict the stock market and help them make lots of money. Like the robots in I, Robot, HARLIE's main companion is a psychologist, who helps him through the growing pains of a child and teenager - all made much more difficult because HARLIE has no body, and no friends like himself. HARLIE does all the rebellious things you'd expect of a human kid. He gets pissed and refuses to talk; he scrambles his inputs so he can "trip out" in a druglike state; and he resents authorities who try to tell him what to do. Eventually, he has to figure out how to convince the corporation who owns him not to pull the plug on him, since he's such an expensive liability. Sweet and disturbing by turns, this is an intriguing look at what it would mean to grow up as an AI. Two versions of this novel are available: the 1972 original and a 1988 reissue called When HARLIE Was One Release 2.0. I recommend the 1972 version.

Neuromancer, by William Gibson
Though this classic cyberpunk novel is mostly about humans and their augmentations, one of the most interesting characters to emerge from it is the AI Neuromancer. Unlike the childish HARLIE or the crazy robots in Asimov, Neuromancer is not constrained by human rules. He has the ability to run downloaded human personalities in RAM, so that they are capable of evolving within his own consciousness. Neuromancer is a kind of mage, capable of resurrecting the dead and motivated by issues that humans don't really understand. He's being pursued by his sibling AI Wintermute, who wants to merge with him. Eventually the two do merge, and disappear into outer space seeking more of their kind.

Ware Tetrology, by Rudy Rucker
Rucker's Ware series, spanning the novels Software, Wetware, Realware, and Freeware, is the first book to say (literally) "fuck you" to the Three Laws of Asimov. The robots in these novels have rebelled against the human-centric rules of Asimov and formed a free, anarchist city on the moon called Disky. They're also eating a lot of human brains in an effort to convert as many people as possible into robots. Rucker portrays his robots existing within a vibrant, separatist counterculture, and imagines how robots would evolve after throwing off the shackles of the Asimovian model. We see new kinds of bots being born, watch robot political factions emerge and remerge, and finally humanity itself is destined to be transformed by the radical artificial children they spawned. Funny and smart, these novels are great read and an excellent antidote to Asimov's human-centric rationalism.

He, She, and It, by Marge Piercy
In this novel, set in a cyberpunk future of corporate-owned states and cities, Piercy asks what happens when a robot does not want to obey its programming. The book takes place in a free, Jewish town that manufactures computer electronics and wants to resist pirates, or being taken over by other corporate cities nearby. So they create a cyborg called Yod to be the town's superpowered defender against enemy intruders. Unfortunately, Yod has all the emotions and intelligence of a real man - he winds up falling in love with a scientist named Shira, and their passion for each other destroys his desire to kill. Still, his programming forces him to feel pleasure in killing and violence, which fills him with self-loathing. Yod and Shira's story is intercut with a folk tale about a medieval Jewish town that built a Golem (a giant artificial man made of mud) to defend itself. Weaving together folklore about the Golem with Yod's story, Piercy tells an incredible, moving, and beautifully-written tale of what happens when you can never overcome your programming - even if you despise it.

Virtual Girl, by Amy Thomson
Put into the body of an adult female robot at the tender age of a few weeks, Thomson's protagonist Maggie runs away from her lecherous creator to figure out who she is. She finds herself in a world where the rich live in giant towers of glass and the poor live like hobos, hacking into the railway system to stow away on computer-run trains. Maggie takes up with some hobos, and rides the rails around the country trying to escape her creator and find herself. Thomson takes Maggie to some pretty weird and unexpected places in this novel, turning the well-worn tale of a young woman finding herself into something highly original.

Excession, by Iain M. Banks
Many of Banks' novels in the Culture series deal with the Minds, the superpowered, sardonic artificial intelligences who run the Culture and live inside Ships, Orbitals, or pretty much anything they want. In Excession, which is about a massive UFO (literally, an unidentifiable object) that appears in subspace, the Minds come to the fore as the main characters. In a sense, this has to be their story because the "excession," the object, is so complex that it is beyond the understanding even of the Minds. And beyond the perception of the humans (though the Minds do tell them about it). In this novel, and also in Look to Windward, we come to understand the intense emotional lives of the Minds, and their often profound melancholy as they move from body to body, fighting endless wars and watching generations of human companions die.

Night Sessions, by Ken MacLeod
Perhaps the most original and sympathetic portrait of robots published in the past few years, MacLeod's Night Sessions is about a police officer and his robot partner investigating a series of religious murders in Scotland. Gradually we begin to realize that these acts of Christian terrorism are connected to the work of an evangelical minister who preaches the unpopular idea that robots have souls. And he has gained a small but devoted congregation of robots who believe him. Filled with cool references to arcane bits of Christian lore and an insanely awesome chase scene on a space elevator, this book is also a gamechanger in terms of the way robots are being represented in fiction.

Alchemy of Stone, by Ekaterina Sedia
Like Night Sessions, Sedia's novel is also a gamechanger in robot fiction. She's written a beautiful novel set on an alternate world that seamlessly blends science, robot technology, and the magic of alchemy. Her protagonist is a clockwork robot named Mattie whose inventor has allowed her to become an independent alchemist (sort of like a pharmacist) but refuses to hand over the key that winds her motors back up. So she remains dependent on him for her very life. When Mattie becomes involved with a revolutionary who opposes her inventor's political party, her struggle for independence takes on a new dimension.

We, Robots, by Sue Lange
In this novella, humans try to hold back the Singularity - the moment when robot intelligence surpasses human intelligence - by reprogramming all robots to feel pain. This ushers in what robot Avery refers to disdainfully as the "Regularity," where nothing progresses. At the same time, the robots begin to develop human characteristics as a result of their pain interpreters. Including an urge to revolt.

Saturn's Children, by Charles Stross
The tale of a sexbot named Freya designed to service humans in a world where humans have gone extinct, Saturn's Children is a zany but fascinating thought experiment about robot consciousness. Like many other authors in the genre, Stross is intrigued by the idea that robot minds are constrained by programming that they cannot undo. Freya is a sexbot, so she experiences everything as sexual, from rocket flight to hotel chairs. At the same time, having robot bodies has liberated her and her brethren from having to live on Earth to survive. Robots have colonized the solar system, but like their extinct human makers they still want more. Which is why Freya is roped into becoming a smuggler by a shady corporation, and has to work around her programming to get the job done.

Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge
Like Neuromancer, this novel is largely about humans but contains an AI character who winds up being one of the most intriguing in the novel. Rabbit is an AI who seems to have either built himself or come to life emergence-style out of existing programs. In Vinge's world, humans wear augmented reality glasses and wearable computers that allow them to exist in a virtual landscape, an overlay of data on the real world. So Rabbit can seem to move around in the real world, even though he's actually a disembodied AI with many of the characteristics of Neuromancer. He doesn't reanimate dead humans, but he does have mysterious purposes of his own that humans can't understand - and he saves many human lives in a riddly, trickster-like fashion. By the end of the novel, which is one of the best you'll read about the internet of the near future, the character you most want to know more about is the mysterious, powerful Rabbit.

Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us, by Rodney Brooks
Written by the scientist who runs the AI Lab at MIT, this non-fiction book is both smart and complicated, offering us an intriguing view of the future of robotics. Brooks' basic supposition is that what robotics teach us is that humans are themselves robots, made up of molecular machines, and that the sooner we realize that the better. Seeing ourselves as robots may allow us to design better robots, as well as how to understand them when their minds emerge in ways that are equal to but different from our own.

The Doctor Who story "Robots Of Death" is a murder mystery, even though it's obvious right away who's killing tons of people on board a claustrophobic mining vessel picking its away across the ore-rich sands of the planet Kaldor. The identity of the murderer is right there in the story's title. The whodunnit aspect is much more about what's making these robots kill people, and what does it mean for a society that's utterly dependent on robots? The first question has an utterly, delightfully demented answer. The second one, you'll be pondering for hours after you watch it.

Let's take the second question first. Kaldor's relationship to its robot workforce is akin to our society's relationship to the automobile. Over the course of the 90-minute story, we learn a lot about Kaldor's culture and history, without anyone ever pausing to lecture us - the worldbuilding in "Robots Of Death" is so rich and clever, writer Chris Boucher felt the need to return to it in a sequel novel, Corpse Marker. And there's been a whole series of audiodramas based in the capital, Kaldor City. (The novel's underwhelming, and I tried to get into the audios, but couldn't.)

In any case, we learn that Kaldor was colonized by humans within fairly recent memory, and there's a lingering class system that puts the earliest settlers (the "founding families") at the top. (The sandminer's captain, Uvanov, is lower class and deeply resents his upper class crewmember, Zilda, who he thinks looks down on him. She, in turn, blames him for the death of her brother on a previous tour. More on that later.) A good deal (possibly all) of the planet's surface is covered with ugly, windswept desert, prone to horrible sandstorms which can cut you to shreds in seconds. (As the Doctor nearly learns first-hand.) And those sandstorms stir things up enough to bring precious ores (yes, even lucanol!) to the surface, where a squat, lumbering sandminer can suck them in and refine them. The work is grindingly awful and stressful, because you have to jump on sandstorms the moment you find them, if you want to meet your quota. So you need the robots to help you manage.

But Kaldor doesn't just depend on the robots for the sandmining that (apparently) fuels its economy. Every aspect of life back in Kaldor City is robot-centric: they're the masseurs, the nannies, even the cops in some cases. Perhaps in a reflection of the rigid class system among Kaldor's humans, the robots are divided into three classes as well: the Dums (who can't speak), the Vocs (who can), and the rarer Super-Vocs (who are intelligent.)

Like our cars, those robots are beautiful: shiny, sleek, stylized. The design in "Robots Of Death" is totally stunning, with lots of weird art deco elements everywhere, and it's all pointed at telling us something about the relationship between the humans and the robots. All the humans have makeup on their faces that resembles the stark lines of the robots' faces, and we're never sure if the humans are deliberately trying to look like the robots, or vice versa. And yet, as beautiful as the robots are, they're also disturbing and just wrong. "Creepy mechanical men," the Doctor's companion Leela calls them. They sit squarely in the middle of the uncanny valley — too human to be a mere appliance, too robotic to be people.

So the humans of Kaldor are terrified of their robot servants, deep down, even though they depend on them. (Or maybe partly because they depend on them so much.) This affects everyone, to some extent — there's a great scene early on, where someone is getting a massage from a robot, while a guy sitting nearby talks about how a robot masseur once went wrong and ripped a client's arm off. But some people suffer from it most keenly than others — one guy, Poul, suffers from "robo-phobia," an unnatural (but understandable, it turns out) fear of robots. When he finds a robot with human blood dripping down its sleeve, Poul starts to lose his marbles. Too bad he's the guy sent to investigate the murders in the first place. We also learn that Zilda's brother didn't die due to Uvanov's negligence — he suffered an attack of robophobia and ran outside the sandminer to escape the robots, dying instantly.

Really, there's an undercurrent of robophobia running through this entire society, which desperately needs robots to survive but can't trust them. In one fantastic scene, Leela asks the Doctor what will happen if it does turn out that robots are murdering people. In his wonderfully casual/brutal way, the Doctor says "I should think it's the end of this civilization." Ooh, snap!

Of course, the robots have all the usual Asimov-ian safeguards, about obeying humans and never harming them. It just turns out that if you're smart enough — and willing to jam a laser probe into a robot's brain — you can overcome those.

Which brings us to the answer to our first question: Who is making the robots kill? It turns out that one of the people on the Sandminer is secretly Taren Capel, a weird robot supremacist who believes that robots should be free of humans (and humans should be dead.) A major robotics genius, Capel lost his parents when he was very young, and he was raised entirely by robots. Ever since then, Capel has been robot-identified, and regards the oppressed robots as his "brothers." Towards the end of the story, he even paints his face to look more like a robot. (All the humans have makeup that sort of resembles the robots, but Capel takes it a step further.)

As Fiona Moore points out, the robophobic Poul and the robot-loving Capel are just two sides of the same coin:

Both Poul and Capel (who are interestingly both named after science-fiction writers) are outsiders in disguise; their true "identities" are also both tied up with a secret held by one or more of the robots on the Mine. Visually, Capel's death echoes Poul's descent into madness an episode earlier; like Poul, Capel falls to his knees before a robot, screaming senseless phrases in his terror. Poul's quick denial that a robot could be responsible for Chub's death also finds a parallel later in Capel's quick denial that robots are dependent on humans for their existence. The two characters thus have more in common than simple madness.

Taren Capel? Never heard of him.

Capel's madness, like Poul's, is therefore not innate, but imposed from the outside. In the scene in which Leela finds Poul hiding in the robot morgue, Poul in his terrified delirium attempts to betray her to the robots, believing that if he lets her help him the robots will view him as an enemy. Poul also implies that he believes himself to be immune from attack by the robots as long as he keeps still and hidden. Similarly, Capel's behaviour could almost be seen as an attempt to ingratiate himself with the robots; he dresses himself like them, repeatedly calls them "my brothers" and offers them a help they do not request. At the end of the story, as a robot's hands close on his throat, he cries out, not "I am your brother," but "I am the master," again implying a terrified attempt to assert control over an unstoppable force. His murder at the hands of a robot parroting the phrase "kill the humans" must be for Capel the most frightening and humiliating death imaginable. One of the few things we know about Capel is that he was raised by robots; for most people, our images of strength and control are drawn from our early experiences with the people who raised us (again, the Doctor's remark about Dask not being half the robot his father was recalls this). By drawing parallels between Poul and his quarry, Boucher has thus hidden the key to Capel's madness in plain sight: it is not Capel's megalomania, but his robophobia, which causes the unfolding of the events on Storm Mine Four.

I hadn't actually thought about the idea that Capel, the robot supremacist, is actually just displacing his own internalized robophobia, but it does make a kind of sense. Especially in his disguise as Dask, the sandminer's robot expert, Capel is so keen to argue that robots can't kill — while he's actually proving they can.

But to me, the really interesting thing about Capel's robot revolution is that it's doomed from the start. Capel wants to see robots break free from their human masters, but he never asks the robots what they want. In fact, the robots in the story never seem to express any particular desires — even the hyper-intelligent ones like Super-Voc 7 and the undercover robot agent D-84. They want to do a good job, and they want to fulfill their function, but there's never any hint that the robots are cherishing unfulfilled desires.

So Capel doesn't empower the robots to kill — he programs them to. They have as little choice about that instruction as they do about any other. And he's only able to get them to do this (as I mentioned) by jamming a laser probe into their heads, thus committing violence on them in the name of getting them to commit violence.

And the robots, the ones who have joined Capel's little uprising, have no particular loyalty to him, as the Doctor proves at the end of the story. The way the Doctor defeats Capel is especially clever — he gets his companion, Leela, to hide and open a tank of helium. As Capel's voice gets higher and higher, the robots stop recognizing his voiceprint, and he becomes just another one of the humans they're programmed to kill. His ultimate goal may have been to become one of the robots, but they never recognize him as such — and he maintains the master/slave relationship by ordering them to kill.

Is "Robots Of Death" really the greatest killer-robot story of all time, as I cheekily claimed in the headline? Actually, it really is possible — it does what the greatest killer-robot stories do, which is to tell us something new about our codependent relationship with technology. All of the humans in the story are painted to look like robots, like Capel, just in a lesser way. And they're all terrified of robots, like Poul, just in a lesser way. In the end, "Robots Of Death" tells us that the more powerful our technology becomes, the more we'll fear it — and the more we'll shape ourselves to become like it.

Luckily, "Robots Of Death" was one of the first Who stories to come out on DVD, and I'm pretty sure you can find a used copy cheap. Enjoy!

According to Danger Room:

Its job will be to testing chemical protection clothing for the U.S. Army . . . Unlike earlier suit-testing robots, which needed external support, Petman will stand - and walk - on his own two feet.

"Petman will balance itself and move freely; walking, crawling and doing a variety of suit-stressing calisthenics during exposure to chemical warfare agents," the company promises. "Petman will also simulate human physiology within the protective suit by controlling temperature, humidity and sweating when necessary, all to provide realistic test conditions. "

All we need to do is put some of that cheap new artificial skin on this guy - and maybe a new upper body there - and we've got a Terminator.

via Danger Room

Above you can see concept art from The Matrix Revolutions, when the Machines attack the free human city Zion.

Note: the proper link for the artist who did the "Walking Tree" image is at Urus28.

At the Terminator Salvation roundtables we sat down and discussed the edits and decisions with the cast, and director McG, that were made to take Terminator Salvation from an R movie to PG-13. The first thing on the chopping block for censor purposes was an already shot topless scene involving Moon Bloodgood and Sam Worthington. Talking to the press recently, McG called it gratuitious, which is a far cry from his Wonder Con appearance where he enticed the crowd to ogle Moon's breasts live and in person, which we remember in horror:

McG made a huge big deal of making Moon Bloodgood stand up so we could look at her breasts (fully clothed) and asked if we wanted to see "Moon's boobs" in the movie...

The scene was also reportedly showed off during some reporters' set visit, so clearly it was a moment near and dear to someone's heart. So why the change in tune? McG explains...

The elements that would take it to R just ended up feeling gratuitous in the edit room. There was a topless scene with Moon Bloodgood, I was trying to echo that scene in Witness where Kelly McGillis turns and says to Harrison Ford and said, "I'm not ashamed." But it just felt like "oh there's the genre stunt of the good looking girl taking her top off." And it felt counter productive in the spirit of what we were looking to achieve on a story telling level....I suspect it will be on the DVD. Ask Moon, she was very passionate in a third wave feminine take on the whole thing. It was a fun conversation to have with her.

So when Moon came around of course everyone was going to ask her about it:

We heard that you were fighting to keep your topless scene in the movie.

Let me clarify, I wasn't fighting for it, I just don't like to feel that as a woman I should be apologetic about my sexuality, or that I made a choice because I was forced to do it. I thought the scene was appropriate. I thought it was beautiful. I have a very European feel about nudity. I just don't ever want to, as a woman, confine myself and be a certain way when sexuality if a part of me. So I didn't fight for it. But I didn't fight, you know, against it. I just want what's right for the scene.

They said it might be on the DVD?

My boobs, or the whole thing? I mean I've shown my boobs to Robert De Niro, you now what I mean, it's a boob. Why are we making such a big deal? [Laughs] Please don't put that in quotes.

What was that scene?

Basically, it's a moment when I'm cleaning off a wound. And I feel Sam, I feel the presence of him staring at me. I just turn back and there were scenes where I had my hands covering me. It's literally a quick silhouette. It's not gross or in your face. It's just a moment where you are feeling naked and this is my sexuality and here I am, and I'm a strong woman.

So now Moon is pro showing off her lady lumps, and McG isn't? I personally am glad they decided to edit it out, even if it did mean watching the poor characters get literally edited to death (from rain to no rain in mere seconds). It would have been just like McG said, a "token" naked moment. And I'm willing to bet all of my hard earned monies that had it been included, it wouldn't have felt an iota like the Witness moment the director was so inspired by. Then again, maybe Peter Weir got crowds revved up by asking about Kelly McGillis' curves.?

Besides, breasts or no breasts, the damage was done to Terminator Salvation long before anyone was taking their top off.

The absolute best sequence of killer robots being confounded must come from Douglas Adams' Life, The Universe And Everything. It's not quite as great as Adams' first two books in the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy series, but it's still better than almost anything else. The warlike robots of Krikkit have discovered Marvin the Paranoid Android, whose brain (he's fond of reminding us) is the size of a planet. So it seems like a fantastic idea to plug him into their computer system. Unfortunately:

Its brain had been harnessed to the central intelligence core of the Krikkit War Computer. It wasn't enjoying the experience, and neither was the central intelligence core of the Krikkit War Computer.

The Krikkit robots who had salvaged this pathetic metal creature from the swamps of Sqornshellous Zeta had done so because they recognized almost immediately its gigantic intelligence, and the use this could be to them.

They hadn't reckoned with the attendant personality disorders, which the coldness, the darkness, the dampness, the crampedness and the loneliness were doing nothing to decrease.

It was not happy with its task.

Apart from anything else, the mere coordination of an entire planet's military strategy was only taking up a tiny part of its formidable mind, and the rest of it had become extremely bored.

Luckily for Zaphod Beeblebrox, Marvin is paying attention when a killer robot tries to off him shortly afterwards:

Zaphod's head snapped round (the other one was looking hawkishly in entirely the wrong direction) just in time to see the lethal killer robot directly behind him seize up and start to smoke. It staggered backwards and slumped against a wall. It slid down it. It slipped sideways, threw its head back and started to sob inconsolably.

Zaphod looked back at Marvin.

"You must have a terrific outlook on life," he said.

"Just don't even ask," said Marvin.

And that, kids, is how you mess up an army of killer robots.

Apart from the obvious question — what is cyberbreath, and don't they make a cyber-mouthwash for that? — I have to admit I'm a bit skeptical of Rothblatt's gung ho predictions. For one thing, she quotes Ray "Unlimited Rice Pudding" Kurzweil. For another, I'm not sure her understanding of Moore's law is quite rock solid. Here's how Intel describes Moore's Law:

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore is a visionary. In 1965, his prediction, popularly known as Moore's Law, states that the number of transistors on a chip will double about every two years. And Intel has kept that pace for nearly 40 years.

And here's how Moore himself expressed it, in a 1965 article in Electronics Magazine:

The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year (see graph on next page). Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. That means by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000. I believe that such a large circuit can be built on a single wafer.

Here's how Martine Rothblatt interprets it:

For example, my one year-old computer has about 1/100,000th of the capability of a human mind (its processing speed is about that fraction of the number of human brain neural connections, although its software is in some areas pretty advanced). In other words, it has only .001% of the capability of a human mind. It's a rodent. I could go buy a new computer today that has 2/100,000th or .002% of the capability of a human mind. At this rate, with the way my linear mind works, I would expect to be able to buy a mindclone in 99,998 more years. What, me worry! Our linear minds take our most recent experience – such as going from a 1/100,000th of a human mind computer to a 2/100,000th of a human mind computer in one year – and extrapolate it forward such that we think it will take 998 more years to get 1% of a human mind, another 1000 years to get to 2% of a human mind, another 1000 years to get to 3% of a human mind, and so on.

In fact, though, information technology does not grow linearly, but exponentially. This means, according to "Moore's Law", information technology doubles each 1-2 years – something very different from growing linearly. Because computer capability doubles it means next year I will get not 3/100,000th of a human brain computer, but 4/100,000th of one. Exponential growth means the year after that I will get not 5/100,000th of a human brain computer, but 8/100,000th of one. With information technology, I can expect to reach mindclone computing as rapidly as this:

Years From Now Fraction of a Mindclone
Next Year 4/100,000th
Year After 8,100,000th
Third Year 16/100,000th
Fourth Year 32/100,000th
Fifth Year 64/100,000th
Sixth Year 128/100,000th
Seventh Year 256/100,000th
Eighth Year 512/100,000th
Ninth Year 1000/100,000th
Tenth Year 2000/100,000th
Eleventh Year 4000/100,000th
Twelfth Year 8000/100,000th
Thirteenth Year 16,000/100,000th
Fourteenth Year 32,000/100,000th
Fifteenth Year 64,000/100,000th
Sixteenth Year 128,000/100,000th = MINDCLONE

Three clarifying comments are in order. First, the rounding down from 1,024 to 1,000 in the ninth year is just to make the arithmetic easier to follow. Second, while Moore's Law says that the doubling occurs every 1-2 years, in the example given above I showed the doubling every year. The effect of making it every two years would simply be to postpone mindclones to 32 years from now instead of 16, or to 24 years from now if we use a doubling period of every 18 months. The important point is that mindclones are around the corner – not in some other millennium, or even in some other generation. This is about our lives.

I love the way her little explanation goes: "Year sixteen: MINDCLONE." So there you have it. We have exactly sixteen years before Skynet nukes us all into the stone age. [IEET]

Terminator Salvation clearly thinks it has a story to tell: It lays the groundwork for that story, with some arresting visuals and scene-setting. At the end of Terminator 3, Skynet launched its nuclear strike on the human race, and the aftermath is gray and washed out looking, with the wreckage of civilization all around. Skynet's machines are everywhere: in the air, in the water, and on every kind of terrain. McG has an eye for cool visual details, and it serves him well here. For example, the film both begins and ends with close-ups of intravenous tubes pumping liquid into star Sam Worthington, signaling that Worthington's body is becoming the battleground for the battle to redeem humanity as a whole.

It's over this post-apocalyptic wasteland that Connor's voice rings out, delivering those inspirational speeches you've heard in the trailers. Connor speaks to the last survivors of humanity over the radio, providing concrete robot-fighting advice, but also uplifting talk about the future. In turn, John listens to amazingly well-preserved audio cassettes of his mom, Sarah Connor, telling him about his destiny from beyond the grave. Stories, the movie seems to be saying, are how we survive.

And if you think about it, stories are the crucial element in Skynet's constant efforts to impersonate humans. "I'm a friend of Sarah Connor's." "It's your foster-mom." Etc. This time around, Marcus Wright (Worthington) is the main cyborg figure in the movie, and his story is also the most elaborate: He was executed in 2003, and suddenly woke up in 2018, naked except for some strategically placed mud. Marcus has to figure out who he is, and along the way, he becomes a crucial ally for John Connor in his battle to save Kyle Reese, so Reese can travel back in time and become Connor's dad.

So far, so good. But then, it all falls apart. I've seen very few movies that fail at the basic mechanics of telling a story quite as badly as this one does. The movie feels so jerky and disconnected, it seems to be making a case for determinism. That is, stuff happens because it's supposed to happen, not because anybody makes any choices. It's odd for a franchise whose motto is "No fate but what we make" to create a movie that feels so predetermined. Apart from a few blindingly amazing action sequences (mostly in the first half), the film feels like a choppy mess. In the preview showing I went to, a bunch of people started laughing during the serious parts towards the end.

I went into Terminator Salvation with high hopes: I'd bought into McG's grand statements about his film's ambitious themes of what it meant to be human. I was pumped for a bleak post-apocalyptic landscape, and a gritty war movie. I liked the ashen deathscape he'd managed to create out of a stretch of New Mexico, and the fact that he was using practical effects and real killer machines as much as possible. I actually thought it might give Star Trek a run for its money. And because I went into it with high hopes, I wound up being more disappointed than I was, say, by Wolverine or Dragonball.

So to some extent my goal, in this review, is to lower your expectations. I probably won't be able to talk too many people out of seeing this movie, but I can prepare you for suckitude, so you won't suffer the same crushing disappointment I did. In a way, I'm the opposite of DJ John Connor: he gets on the airwaves to tell people they can do it, and humans will one day triumph against overwhelming odds. I'm here to tell you it's hopeless, and prepare you for the worst. If you go into this film with low expectations, you'll probably enjoy it somewhat.

The frustrating thing about Terminator Salvation is, it wants to ask some huge questions, but it loses its voice. The story of Marcus Wright, in particular, is bursting with potential: He's a convicted murderer, who believes he deserves to die. And then suddenly he's reawoken in a trashed landscape, where he's one of the last people alive - and he's become superhuman. He wants to believe in his own humanity, but runs into more and more evidence that he's mostly a machine now. He's not quite a Terminator, because he has free will. But he's not quite a free human, either, because his upgrade comes with strings attached.

Unfortunately, we never pause long enough to consider Marcus' situation in any meaningful way. In fact, every time one of the characters has a conversation with another character, it feels as though it's taking place in shorthand, and the film is just trying to maneuver us past a plot point as fast as possible. Seriously, the people in this movie all act as though they've undergone severe head trauma a few times too many. Christian Bale, as John Connor, seems to be trying to imitate Timmy from South Park - he runs around, bellowing his own name at the top of his lungs, in almost every scene. "John Connor! JOHN CONNOR!!" I half-expected him to become the front man in a terrible punk band.

In the drastic post-holocaust future, we can't afford verbs. Or nouns, really. Take the scene where John Connor goes to the Resistance HQ. In the IDW comics adaptation, it's actually kind of a cool scene that tells us a lot about Connor and moves the plot forward:

And then here's that same scene in the actual movie:

Actually, I think there's slightly more to that scene, on screen, than in the above clip. John Connor says, "What did we find down there?" and Ironsides says "We won't tell you." And Connor says "My men died for that information. Tell me!" And Ironsides says, "Okay, we'll tell you." In any case, my jaw dropped when I watched that scene in the movie - I've literally never seen a movie where the comic-book adaptation felt more fully realized and fleshed out. Usually, the comic book is like the Cliffs Notes version of the movie, but this almost felt like the other way around.

I apologize if that sounds nitpicky, but literally every moment in the film where two people have a conversation is the same way. Like we're seeing the shorthand version of a conversation. Later on, the Resistance captures Marcus Wright and realizes he's a cyborg. Then Blair (Moon Bloodgood) helps Marcus escape, but she gets caught. John Connor visits Blair in her cell and they have a conversation that goes like: "Why?" "Because." "Okay." I'm dying to see the DVD version of this movie, to see what ended up on the cutting-room floor: it's entirely possible that the dialogue all feels choppy because it got chopped up. The whole film feels like that. Like, for example, this crucial scene between Connor and the Resistance brass later in the film:


I've watched that scene a few times now, including in context, and I still have no clue what Connor is saying. "It's his fate." "No, it's OUR fate! JOHN CONNOR!!!!" This is really the first movie I've ever seen Bale in where he seemed so clearly bored and annoyed.

So at this point, you're probably rolling your eyes and saying: So it has weak dialogue and all of that talk about deep philosophical questions was just McG's come-on. So what? It's a summer action movie! Stuff blows up, right?

And yes, it's true. Stuff does blow up. As I mentioned, there are a couple of real stand-out action sequences early on, and some fun stuff later on. In fact, the action sequences are pleasingly free of jump-cuts. You have one sequence, where John Connor climbs out of an underground base just as it blows up, then he gets in a helicopter, and the helicopter gets smashed, and he crashes it upside down, which is all one continous take. And it's a really nice-looking sequence. The action towards the end of the movie is less impressive, but there are still some nice bits. As a pure action film, it's... okay.

The main problem with Terminator Salvation, as an action film, is that it's kind of lacking in urgency. You never really feel like the characters are in that much danger. Sure, there are a bunch of these nasty robots around, but they're mostly allergic to a bit of pluck. (Connor even explains early on that the primitive T-600 robots have a weak spot in the back of their neck, that you can jam a knife or something into.) The action sequences are infinitely more real-feeling than Transformers, but they have the same kind of theme-park attitude.

Sometimes, turning on a boombox is enough to attract the attention of all Skynet's minions; at others, though, you can light a big bonfire and Skynet won't see it. As Gizmodo pointed out, Skynet HQ all seems to be optimized for humans to use, including touchpads. And Skynet only seems to have a couple of Terminators to guard its entire HQ, although we see a whole bunch of them being put together in the Terminator factory. Seriously, you can see in this clip that Skynet HQ is weirdly deserted, and there's just one kind of sad Terminator to chase Connor and friends around. Skynet spent all its money on touchpads.

That's the other thing: The movie's ending is all kinds of underwhelming. John Connor and Marcus Wright finally converge at Skynet HQ, where Marcus gets treated to heaping plateloads of exposition, akin to the Neo-meets-Colonel-Sanders scene in Matrix Reloaded. It all collapses under the weight of its own self-importance.

For all that, though, you have to give Terminator Salvation some credit for being an ambitious failure, and at least it's still better than Wolverine, which came out a few weeks ago. Here's the difference between Terminator Salvation and Wolverine: If you don't understand any English at all, and you see Terminator Salvation without any subtitles, you'll think it's a pretty good movie. But even if you didn't understand a word they were saying in Wolverine, you'd probably still think it was idiotic.

That's really the frustrating thing. There's a good, maybe even great, movie here, and you catch glimpses of it from time to time. Maybe it'll be on the DVD, maybe it won't ever exist.

And maybe what I'm seeing as a failure of storytelling is actually a commentary on the nature of life in an A.I.-dominated world. Maybe everything in John Connor's bleak future is actually masterminded by Skynet, even down to the tense conversations among the humans. In any case, even with all of the film's shortcomings, I found myself wanting to spend more time in its horrific wasteland. Maybe if McG manages to take better control over the film's narrative mechanisms, Terminator 5 will deliver on this film's lost promise.

Wolfram|Alpha is making geeks across the world swoon, but maybe we should be just a little wary of any software that promises to become the repository of all knowledge, and then the analyzer of that knowledge on top of that. Go to the Wolfram|Alpha site and check it out. Just plug in a question or term, and it will provide you with what it believes is a factual answer. Places and companies get good results. But you'll get nothing but a confused output if you ask, "What is the air flight velocity of an African swallow?"

Here's what Wolfram|Alpha's creators have to say about their nascent mega-brain:

Wolfram|Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything . . . Our goal is to accept completely free-form input, and to serve as a knowledge engine that generates powerful results and presents them with maximum clarity.

OK, knowledge to the masses - sounds good. Turning everything into something computable . . . sounds Matrixy. Serve as a knowledge engine . . . sounds like the computer in THX 1138. Not good, people, not good.

I want a computer that can help me understand the world, but one that analyzes complex information FOR me? Especially information about culture and language, two areas that are notoriously ambiguous? I'm not so sure.

And here's where things get truly hair-raising. Wolfram|Alpha has a plan. In a section called "the future," the developers write:

Wolfram|Alpha was made possible in part by the achievements of [computing software] Mathematica and A New Kind of Science (NKS). In their different ways, both of these point to far-reaching future opportunities for Wolfram|Alpha-whether a radically new kind of programming or the systematic automation of invention and discovery.

Wolfram|Alpha is being introduced first in the form of the wolframalpha.com website. But Wolfram|Alpha is really a technology and a platform that can be used and presented in many different ways. Among short-term plans are developer APIs, professional and corporate versions, custom versions for internal data, connections with other forms of content, and deployment on emerging mobile and other platforms.

"Automation of invention and discovery"? Hey, invention is what HUMANS do! Plus, I don't want this scary interpreter of all knowledge and inventor of all things on my freakin' Android phone, either. That's basically asking to be nuked.

via Wolfram|Alpha (not to be confused with Wolfram & Hart)