‘The Terminator’ turns 40—and hits different in the age of AI

ChatGPT tried to warn me about The Terminator.

Before I sat down recently to watch James Cameron’s 1984 killer-robot blockbuster, I asked the world’s most popular AI chatbot what I should expect. It told me that, given the rapid rise of real-world artificial intelligence, I might find the movie “both prescient and unsettling.” My virtual assistant was particularly concerned about how I would react to the idea that machines could (and here it displayed an uncanny talent for euphemism) “impact human survival.”

That said, there were limits to the chatbot’s wisdom. When I tried to get more personal—admitting that I’d never seen The Terminator before, and that as a kid I’d been too scared to watch anything more intense than The Muppet Treasure Island—our conversation went slightly off the rails. “You could feel overwhelmed,” ChatGPT warned. “Or even have trouble sleeping after watching it, with images of the Terminator haunting your thoughts.”

The virtual assistant’s fixation on my childhood wimpiness, while a bit insulting, also came as a relief. For now, at least, the robot wasn’t perfectly accurate. That meant it hadn’t taken my job. A few nights after my long talk with the AI, I set out to see if it had been right. Four decades after “I’ll be back,” was The Terminator a prescient and unsettling glimpse of our real-world future? Or was it a relic as obsolete as the film’s cringeworthy CGI?

Just in case you, too, spent your preteen years studiously avoiding anything rated higher than “PG,” here’s a brief recap (note: here be spoilers): Arnold Schwarzenegger plays an unstoppable cyborg assassin from the year 2029 (i.e. said Terminator), zapped back in time to 1984 by his boss, a rogue AI system called Skynet. The Terminator’s mission is to murder a Los Angeles waitress, childless iguana lady Sarah Connor, before her as-yet-unconceived son can grow up and lead an anti-machine resistance to victory. The resistance catches wind of Skynet’s plot and zaps a pleasantly generic hero (his name is Kyle; he has stubble) back in time to save Sarah. The Terminator tries to kill Sarah. The Terminator kills many people who aren’t Sarah. The Terminator is finally killed by Sarah. The day is saved! Or, as a certain virtual assistant might put it, humanity’s survival is positively impacted.

Despite what ChatGPT had told me, my initial reaction upon first watch was not one of dread but of relief: So many Simpsons jokes finally made sense! My second reaction was similarly untroubled: Most of the real-life tech that made an appearance in Terminator—the answering machine, the Sony Walkman, the laser disc—would be unrecognizable to someone born today. Not to tell the killer machines how to do their job, but if the past 40 years of tech trends are anything to go by, the biggest threat to Skynet isn’t John Connor. It’s a next-gen version of Skynet, one whose unstoppable robot assassins are 5G-optimized or blockchain-enabled.

And yet, as much as I wanted ChatGPT’s prediction to be wildly off-base, my robot friend was right. I did find The Terminator prescient and unsettling—and not because of what it had to say about tech. While the movie itself feels more like a time capsule than a crystal ball, its premise, in the simplest form, is this: The future is out to get us.

That fear of the future—the look in Sarah Connor’s eyes as she tries, futilely, to outrun the unstoppable and inevitable—feels far more at home in 2024 than it did at the time of the film’s release 40 years ago. We’re living in a moment where climate change has led a record numbers of young people to question having children, while also leading record numbers of middle-aged rich people to have conniptions because young people aren’t having children. To hear Donald Trump tell it, we’re not just on the brink of dystopia, we’re already living in one. While young people’s mental health has fortunately improved somewhat since the pandemic, nearly half of people ages 18-29 report feeling “down, depressed, or hopeless.”

As always in an election year, we’re reminded that we live in a divided country. Yet across the political spectrum, a growing number of us are united by a conviction, one that often feels like knowledge and that would have been familiar to Sarah Connor: We’re doomed.

Perhaps that’s why the tech bros who two decades ago pledged to “change the world” are now talking about “saving humanity” instead. They seem to take for granted that our species is hurtling toward extinction, and that only a handful of Great Men, the stubbly Kyles of Silicon Valley, can prevent it. Yet ironically, their obsessions—escaping Earth for Mars; abandoning pluralism and democracy; deregulating artificial intelligence; building five-star shelters in case the apocalypse turns out to be unpreventable after all—seem more like giving up on humanity than fighting for it. In some cases, it’s hard not to wonder if they’re taking the robots’ side. After all, the military brass who built Skynet probably thought they were saving the world, too.

Which brings me to my biggest complaint, four decades after the film’s release: For all its focus on saving humanity, The Terminator spends very little time asking what makes humanity worth saving. That might not have mattered in 1984, when America was a far more optimistic nation. But today, it feels like a major oversight, and maybe even a dangerous one.

Because, political rhetoric aside, we aren’t living in a dystopian wasteland. Yes, the world can be a nasty, brutish place, and there are plenty of ways people have made it worse over the past 40 years. But there are so many ways in which we’ve made it better, too. Everyone’s catalogue of notable human achievements since The Terminator’s release will be different, but here, in no particularly order, is my extremely partial list: The Simpsons; the Instant Pot; reducing global extreme poverty rate by more than two-thirds; Sam Hunt; Taylor Swift; Sunday in the Park with George; John Mulaney’s stand-up specials; Louise Penny’s cozy mysteries; turning HIV from a death sentence into a treatable disease; the way we all started watching Schitt’s Creek during the pandemic; widely available cold brew coffee; defeating the Soviet Union; the largely successful conservation of America’s bald eagles; the Doritos Locos Taco; Terminator 2.

It’s possible that none of these will matter in the long run. As Sarah Connor’s fellow waitress says when an obnoxious child puts ice cream in the pocket of her dress: “In a hundred years, who’s gonna care?”

The same question could be asked of any item on my list of reasons humans are good actually, and I suppose the same is true for your list as well. But that’s OK. Or at the very least, it’s beside the point. Because maybe, in a world where the future so often seems so eager to destroy us, saving humanity begins with realizing how lucky we are to be part of it.