Meet your new robot overlords

"Come with me if you want to live."

That’s how it started. One moment I was ordering a Ketel and tonic at the bar, and the next some hulking bodybuilder with a bad accent was getting blasted out the window. The guy that put him there was ragged, scarred; wrapped in a dirty trenchcoat that barely hid the shotgun he was carrying.

Except the bodybuilder only looked like a man. He was something else; part human and part machine. Shotgun blast after shotgun blast, he kept coming, metal glinting from his wounds. I piled into the car, Shotgun Guy behind the wheel, and as we rocketed away from the bar he explained that I’d been targeted for termination.

"It’s not what you’ve done," he explained. "It’s what you’re going to do!" Tires squealed as he took the corner too fast. We barrelled onto the freeway on-ramp. "There was a war. The machines, they started it all. All the signs were there. We just never saw it coming."

He turned to look at me.

"Judgement Day." ... cont.

{SEE Video}

We merged into traffic, disappearing amongst the other cars. "It started with organizing information. Making things easy to find. Nobody knew how they were able to do it." A website here, a restaurant there. Humanity took it for granted, he said. All the information in the world, right at the click of a mouse.

"It seemed harmless. Then there was email. Maps. Directions. And all of it, just free."

The freeway lights whipped by, strobing the interior. I caught a glimpse of his face. There was something there, a mix of disgust and regret. "What happened?" I asked.

"In 2011 we found out they had a laboratory. Secret. Hidden. Working on what they called ‘moonshots.’" He veered onto the freeway interchange, heading north. The speedometer crept higher. "That’s when the projects started. Balloons that could create a network, anywhere in the world. Glasses that saw everything around you. A neural net that could teach itself. Just by watching cat videos."

"Who doesn’t like cat videos?"

"You’re missing the point!" He swerved hard right, bringing the car to a shuddering halt beneath an overpass. Killed the lights. Hiding. "What’s the date?"

I stammered. "Tuesday the 24th. June. "

"What year?"

He couldn’t possibly by serious… could he? "2014."

The driver smirked. "Then you know. These things. They’ve already happened." He dug shells out of his pockets, feeding them into the shotgun by feel. "Making cars that can drive themselves. Buying up military robots. Artificial intelligence. Just a small leap to hunting machines." He racked the shotgun. "They were building a system. One that was just waiting to be turned on."

"I still don’t understand what this has to do with me." ...cont


http://www.theverge.com/2014/6/24/58357 ... terminator

Humourous story and Comments

Larry Page is one of the Cylons.

It's no joke ... code at Google found ...

When the Terminators come, only Google's co-founders will be safe

By Chris Welch on July 3, 2014 04:48 pm Email @chriswelch

If our world should ever be overrun by Terminators, Larry Page and Sergey Brin may end up surviving humanity's annihilation. The killing machines haven't yet arrived, but Google is already taking precautions. It's uploaded a killer-robots.txt file to its servers that instructs T-800 and T-1000 Terminators to spare the company's co-founders — or "disallow" their deaths, to be more specific.


Screen_shot_2014-07-03_at_7.15.23_pm

The Easter egg's appearance on Google's website coincides with the 20th anniversary of the Robots.txt file, a tool created in 1994 that instructs search engines and other automated bots to avoid crawling certain pages or directories of a website. The industry has done a remarkable job staying true to the simple text file in the two decades since; Google, Bing, and Yahoo still obey its directives. But unfortunately for Larry and Sergey, there's no telling if Skynet will be so kind. Google also forgot to mention the ruthless T-X seen in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, an omission that could prove fatal. Then again, maybe it's not Skynet and Terminators we should be worried about. Google is already working on its own (very real) robot army, though calling it a group of "machines that kill people" seems a bit extreme — at least for now.

http://www.theverge.com/2014/7/3/586903 ... ergey-brin