roxybisquaint | Born to Fail

Entry tags:

Born to Fail - part 1

It's been a week now and after my fourth viewing of Born To Run, it doesn't make me miserable anymore. I guess I finally desensitized to what I disliked and that freed me up to think about the rest. I've got gripes and grievances, nits to pick and sundries to poke. But there are good moments to talk about too (and lots of speculation to be done).

I'll show you my shielded nuclear power source if you show me yours

If Cameron's power supply was damaged, wouldn't John have cancer too? Even so, if she believed it could be leaking radiation, why the hell would she let him touch it? And she really had to be laying down and he had to be on top of her to get to it? Please. That scene just didn't add up. It was either a really flimsy setup for Jameron cheers or it was a weak manipulation by Cameron that worked because the blood had left John's brain. I tend to think the latter. Since we just had the Jesse story wherein she spent all season trying to win future war by messing with John's love life, I really hope we're not going to find out Cameron was doing the same. But at this point it's looking that way.

Regardless, to try to get us to the point of John choosing to throw away everything to follow Cameron through time, we needed something like that — a moment of intimacy to push him from being unsure about his feelings for Cameron to deciding he loves her and can't live without her. So forced and awkward as it was, John checking out her breasts, climbing on top of her and slipping his fingers in her, um, sliced open chest, served a purpose.

Massive points for the not!sex cleverness of the scene, but it was disturbing on many levels. From the sadomasochistic not!foreplay with the knife to the "that's good, that's perfect" intensity of John realizing Cameron isn't the cause of mom's cancer, one thing is clear: that boy needs some therapy. I don't think John actually wants to fuck his mother, but the connection between Cameron and Sarah was clear...

In Charley's house in the pilot, Sarah was sitting on John's bed, watching him sleep. He jolts awake, tells her it's freaky when she does that and asks, "what's going on?" She tells him they have to go.

In the motel, Cameron was sitting on John's bed, watching him sleep. He jolts awake, tells her not to do that because his mom used to do it and he hates it. Then he asks, "what's going on?" Not!sex happens and she tells him it's time to go.

Aside from the squickiness of the similarity of those scenes, the other significance is that they both ultimately lead to a time jump.

The time jump

While the jump has the potential to push the story too far from its roots (and jackknife a giant puh-lease on the already congested time travel highway), it's also an interesting way to explore the what if scenario of a future war without John Connor. So I didn't mind the jump and I'm actually curious to see how it plays out. What I did mind, though — what I absolutely hated — was the way it happened:

John ditched his mother, who he believed had cancer, and bailed on trying to stop the apocalypse so he could jump to the future with some liquid metal he'd just met (whose motives were questionable at best and who was verbally bitch-slapping his mom all over the place) to pursue his one true love: a computer chip. I can't cheer that. I can't be wowed by that. I can't even pretend to enjoy that. It's fucked up and I'm not okay with it. Sarah, however, was okay with it. Um, what?

When John got aroused by touching Cameron's icy cold ~~heart~~ power supply, I should've known this wouldn't end well. I realize he's only 17 and doesn't always have the best judgement. He makes mistakes and acts rather impulsively and irresponsibly at times. I get that. In fact I like a flawed John Connor. I like that the show didn't present him as this perfect teenage kid that's ready to take on the role of saving the world. But we've gone through a lot with him this season and throwing away everything his life has been about felt like a major step backwards.

So we sort of circled back around to Samson & Delilah, but instead of John being unable to let Cameron go because he viewed her as a better protector than his mom, this time he was unable to let Cameron go because he loves her. The mother/lover blurring was getting thick anyway, so I'm glad it's over. I think I'm glad John finally came out of the closet as a cyborg lover and moved out of 2009. And it was fun that he moved in with dad. Check the final VO line in my faux S&D script from last August :D

I'd like to think the reason Sarah let John go is because she figures he's better off with Cameron in the future than alone in the present watching her die (just like when she took him to Charley). I'd still have a hard time with that, but at least it would carry some emotional weight. The other possibility is that Cameron's attempt to manipulate Sarah with "humans are the problem" actually sort of worked. When she was stepping out of the bubble, though, she said "John, we can't." We can't. Sarah didn't want him to go, didn't think he should go. So that pretty well cancels out any notion that she was thinking he'd be better off leaving — better off being away from her.

In "Samson & Delilah", Sarah told John "Maybe you could fix her. I know you want to try, but I can't let you." And we know how that ended up. In "Today is the Day pt1", she told Cameron she'd thought about taking her out with Derek's sniper rifle but she didn't because John would never have forgiven her. So maybe the desperation in John's voice when he said, "he's got her chip, he's got her," made Sarah realize she'd truly lost him to Cameron.

I still don't know if Sarah thought John loved Cameron or was bonded to her like family or what, but at the very least, Sarah understood that John had a powerful attachment to her and there was nothing she could do or say to come between that. So she let him go and she stayed behind to carry on the fight alone. It doesn't work for me, but that's all I can come up with so far.

Without John, your life has no purpose

The series started with Sarah telling John she'd stop Skynet and she reiterated that as he was leaving. So she still has a mission, still has a goal, still has a purpose and that's why she stepped out of the bubble. But what happens to Sarah when she doesn't have her son to fight for anymore? John has sort of been Sarah's moral compass. How could she raise him up to save humanity if she gave up her own in the process? So she's been fighting the good fight for his sake. She has "participated in the miraculous and the terrible and through it all... maintained a moral and good soul." Well, mostly.

She'll continue to battle Kaliba and work to stop judgement day, and with John gone, I think we can be sure she'll throw herself into it like never before. Cancer or no cancer, you know the woman will fight on until she collapses. But will she still be fighting for John or fighting for humanity or will she just be fighting because it's all she knows? Will she start to believe, as Ellison said, that she's got nothing left to lose? "There's always something to lose," though. I think that something is her soul.

Here's bad news...

Sarah and John failed

Sarah never did stop Skynet and John never did lead the resistance. There was no John Connor when the resistance was formed. He vanished off the face of the earth in 2009 and didn’t resurface until 2027(?). And since it's a post-apocalyptic world, we know judgment day happened. It gets worse. With John at one end of the timeline and Sarah at the other end of that same timeline, it's a closed system. The future IS set now. It's a done deal... They failed.

Assuming judgement day is still set at April 21, 2011, Sarah might spend the next two years running from the law, protecting Savannah, looking for Danny Dyson, and battling Kaliba. But whatever she does has already happened at John's end and it failed to stop the apocalypse. John not leading the resistance might not be a failure. Whoever did form it might be doing an awesome job. I really doubt that, though. I think we're likely to find out that this future is hell and the resistance is losing.

Can their failures be erased? Of course. But only if John jumps back. That would free up the path to an unknown future again. In the meantime, we'll be spending time with Sarah doing things that ultimately don't matter and we'll be spending time with John maybe learning things that won't matter until he comes back. So, cool or not, I think it's likely to be a short stay.

Cause and effect

I got deep into time travel once before and settled on multiple timelines (multiverse) in TSCC. I'm still inclined to think that's what we have going on, despite a few discrepancies in the show. Jesse and Derek established the existence of multiple futures, which I translate into multiple timelines. But it's possible the writers are using some sort of single timeline theory in which anything can happen. I hope not because that gets a little Back to the Future hokey. But I do think we've hit a point where we need to know. When you hurtle John Connor into future war, it's time to set some ground rules.

With characters at both ends of the spectrum, we'll see the result of everything that happens in between. From Sarah's perspective, anything can happen, but from John's perspective it's all history. Sarah won't know what became of John after he jumped or know the future effects of her actions. But John may learn a bit about what his mom did after he jumped away in 2009. By giving us both stories, it could be that we'll sort of get a real-time view of Sarah's impact on the future. In other words, we might get to see the cause of what John sees and the effect of what Sarah does. I don't think that's a long-lasting way to tell a story, but it could be interesting in the short term.

One possible future, I don't know tech stuff

I've seen a lot of speculation that John has jumped to a point before he became the leader of the resistance. Also that the out-of-focus teen John behind Derek in the time chamber in "Dungeons & Dragons" was an actual reveal of how old future!John really was. That's incorrect. This is an alternate future, not one that's been hinted at and not a precursor to what we already knew. Here's why:

- In "Dungeons & Dragons", Cameron told John that he spent 6 years in a Skynet work camp with Kyle from 2015-2021. We learned in "What He Beheld" that Kyle was 8 on judgement day (2011), so that would've made him 12 when he and John first got captured. Kyle in this current future is a grown man.

- In "What He Beheld", Derek told John that he celebrated his (John's) 30th birthday with him. That would mean Derek couldn't be sent back on his time travel mission for at least 13 years. And Derek is certainly not 13 years younger right now than what we knew him to be in 2007 (he'd be about 18 years old if he was).

- In "Goodbye to All that", Derek said Martin Bedell helped John form the resistance. Clearly the resistance is already formed.

As for when John is, we can use Allison as a marker. She was probably born in 2008 because her mom was pregnant when Cam called her in "Allison from Palmdale". And she's what, about 18 now? So I'd estimate John to have landed in 2026 or maybe 2027.

John could stay, join the resistance, work his way up the ranks and maybe one day lead the fight. But it would take a long time and it would absolutely be a different story than what we've heard to date. I don't see that happening. Aside from believing Sarah's story is a dead end until John returns, the biggest drawback to him staying in the future is it essentially splits the show into two separate stories: John's and Sarah's. And since she won't have any clue what he's up to, it wouldn't exactly be The Sarah Connor Chronicles anymore. Don't even start with the "it's not about the title character anyway" comments.

I've got lots more to talk about but I'm just going to stop here for now.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I still need to get back to your extensive time travel stuff in the other thread. I tried reading it earlier but just didn't have the time travel brain power today. I think it might have had something to do with lovely spring weather today (makes the brain not want to retreat into deep thought).

As long as no other time travelers jump back before John does, I think he can to jump back to any point. But if any other time travelers do jump back, it'll start a new branch to a new unknown future. If that happens, then yes, he'd either need to jump back to the point he left from or at least jump to a point before the other time traveler landed in order to intersect with Sarah again.

From a story telling standpoint, I think it's better if no one jumps back in time while John's gone. Otherwise we'll end up backtracking on Sarah's timeline to when John does return. What they do after he returns could be completely different than what she did while she was alone, but the time we spent with her would have been wasted.

Future!John's erasable history isn't entirely disposable tho because it could be very important character development even if the future disappears into another timeline with a time jump. Also, he might bring significant characters back - like Allison rather than Cameron. Only the eternal now actually ever exists anyway.

I agree and I really think it's the intangible experience and understanding of things he's going to gain in the future that will be the point of this trip on a character level. When he comes back I think he'll have a true sense of purpose.

Another friend of mine brought up a great point about all the loss/death John has been dealing with this season — the 20 FBI guys, people in Mexico, Riley, Charley, Derek. And Derek told John that everybody dies for him. It's been a heavy burden for him. So one of the big things John will likely come to realize while in the future is that all this loss is not because of him. It's future war and people are going to be dying even without anyone knowing who John Connor is.

magically fixing it all by having the time machine work as required for the plot, rather than the plot follow the logic of time travel, will be disappointing for me.

Yeah that would be a disappointment to me to. I can overlook some discrepancies in the logic here and there for the sake of drama, but I definitely don't want a magical time travel machine that can solve all the complexities of it.

it was Sarah who stepped back out of the time bubble and left John

Really? I've seen a few others say that too, so you're not the only one. I view it this way: Sarah never stepped into the bubble at all. The bubble just happen to form where she were standing. He wanted to go so he stayed in it. She didn't want to go so she stepped out of it. But he's the one who left in it. There's no chance you'll chance my mind on that, but I'd be curious to hear your take on it anyway.

Sarah could have said "we" because she is pregnant with Charlie's child! I'm not betting on that one but it would be a fascinating development, for sure.

Nah. I didn't get the impression she slept with Charley at the Lighthouse. Some people thought maybe she did, but I feel certain she didn't. Even if she did and got pregnant, though, she wouldn't know it yet. It was only a few days from To the Lighthouse to Born to Run.

The Jameron powerpack scene I thought extremely interesting.

It was interesting. As far as the Jameron thing goes, it's the relationship that bothers me (that inappropriate emotional attachment you mentioned). But it seems like most of the people who like John and Cameron together don't think of Cameron as a robot — they think of her as being advanced (evolved?) to the point of having human type emotions and feelings.

The eel being a part of the Weaverbot - could be very significant in S3 plot developments.

I didn't think much about that, but I bet you're right. Knowing now that a portion of liquid metal can operate independently could definitely come into play again. Since it was just an eel, maybe the smaller the portion, the more primitive it is.

>But it seems like most of the people who like John and Cameron together don't think of Cameron as a robot — they think of her as being advanced (evolved?) to the point of having human type emotions and feelings.

I don't think of Cameron as having "human" type emotions and feelings, but I think of her as being advanced enough to have developed a completely different set of emotion-like-mental-processes that make an actual relationship okay in my mind. There's an interview with Summer Glau where she says something like "John is Cameron's entire reason for existing, without him her life has no purpose, and she is devoted to him. I think, for a robot, that's like love." That's pretty much what I feel. And it just occurs to me now that there's a parallel between Cameron and Sarah there.

Cameron will never be able to feel what John feels for her, but neither will he be able to feel what she feels for him, and I don't think either form of love is necessarily "better."

(Yes, I'm totally a John/Cameron shipper, but I also want it to happen in a way that's appropriate and interesting, and also don't think their relationship necessarily needs to seem "romantic." I was really impressed by their scene in Born to Run because it went off in a direction never would have expected yet was far more appropriate than any driveling fanboy's vision)

>The eel being a part of the Weaverbot - could be very significant in S3 plot developments.

I originally thought Savanah might have been an extension of Weaver (back when we only knew she existed). I'm glad they went the route they did, but they could still do something similar in the future.

bobmacpharson, you may be interested to look at this rant of mine:

http://dvc.org.uk/sketches/storr.html

...at least there's a couple of interesting links you might benefit from reflecting on.

It is just not clear to me where these emotion-like-mental processes in a machine would come from (unless they were explicitly programmed in as an emulation which is being talked about by AI researchers). Emotions have their roots in the primal in our biology, it's hard to see what relevance they would have to Cameron/JH - who hotly denies having emotions at various times. (Josh Friedman has presumably been reading the same stuff I have re AI theory.)

I see John's emotional attachment to the robot as pathological but, given his attachment to Arnie in T2, he does have a bit of a history with robots.

In general I agree with what's said there and I don't think it contradicts what I said. Humans have one set of emotions that result from millions of years of evolution. A true artificial intelligence (designed to learn and evolve on its own in response to stimuli, as opposed to simulating human behavior) would never gain the human set of emotions.

However, I do think that as the AI developed it might develop mental processes that are more analogous to feelings than thoughts. I'm struggling a bit on this point because I'm not sure how to define the difference between emotions and thoughts. But I think if you were to continuously interrupt an AI from performing its task, it might draw a set of conclusions that effectively describe you as "annoying." In future interactions with you, those conclusions might affect its judgment in a way similar to how the actual annoyance emotion plays out in humans.

I just watched the episode where Cameron says "Without John, you're life has no meaning" and I'm amazed by how interesting that line is, and how I missed it before. Cameron says it in response to Sarah saying something like "I love my son, you wouldn't understand." Cameron is trying to understand, and she draws a parallel between herself and Sarah to help in that understanding.

Cameron begins by operating under orders to protect John, but she also must consider the fact that without John her existence becomes meaningless, and she cannot self-terminate. So I think it's fair to predict she may eventually decide to protect John even if orders told her otherwise, because so far her entire existence has depended on him and removing him from her thought processes would be traumatic.

Love? Well, not really. If a human felt that way we'd probably consider it a kind of mental disorder, but then, I recall reading that humans who describe themselves as in love tend to have parts of their brain light up that we normally associate with insanity anyway.

Also, with regards to human "morality" and how robots can't have it because they're not a live:

This was a major point of Season 2, methinks, with John Henry. Ellison kept trying to explain the sacredness of life to JH, and JH just did not get it because he had no personal experiences to compare it with, so it was meaningless words. But after JH experiences the shut down, and is effectively crucified over a several year period, helpless to stop it, he suddenly grasps why life matters. So later, when he sees that Savanah is in danger, he is able to make an actual moral choice to help her.

I suggest you read up on sociopaths and psychopaths who are, in many ways, a class of humans with faulty or even absent emotions. Thoughts and emotions vs qualia? This is deep stuff that, given it's just hand-waving and furiously erasing from the whiteboard as fast as you write even on the part of the "authorities" in the field, can be played anyway you like. In actual fact, we don't know what we don't know and what we're mostly finding out now is that we have more questions to ask.

Suffice it to say my considered opinion before I ever watched TSCC was that robots would and only could be psychopaths so you're on a hiding-to-nothing loving one. IMHO, if you read the extant relevant literature it's the inevitable conclusion but I've been studying this on-and-off for over thirty years, including at University, and I can assure you there are no definitive answers to these questions. So, I suppose it's one of those cases that you can legitimately believe what you want to believe absent contradiction from objective reality. Until those crazy Japanese build those Summer Glau sex-robots for us we won't know.

I've read some about about psychopaths as well. I certainly agree that make a good "baseline" for what an AI make be like. But while psychopaths don't feel empathy, and their emotions may be very different, my understanding is they can still develop attachments and have emotions of some kind.

Have you seen Dexter? That seems to be a reasonably accurate depiction of a psychopath to me, and his relationship with his sister and wife strike me as the sort of relationship a robot might have. (John Henry's relationship with Savanah seems similar).

Funny you should mention Dexter...

http://dvc.org.uk/sketches/dexter.html

Psychopaths are a good model but there is a - big - difference between actual human psychopathy and the psychopathy one would logically expect from an AI. Robots will be "pure" psychopaths with genuinely no emotions, only emulated ones. Actual human psychopaths are still human, it's just that they're towards the end of a spectrum of emotional involvement / engagement with people. I suggest you reflect on the likelihood that that a complete psychopath who really for all practical purposes actually has no emotions at all is extremely rare or even actually impossible in humans. Robots, however, would be the archetypal "perfect psychopaths." And all the more scary for it - as Charlie said to Cameron in, "Dungeons and Dragons."

Now I do think TSCC has explored this in various ways via Cameron and John and Ellison and John Henry and via what fighting Terminators has done to Sarah, John, Derek et al (who, in fact, have had to reach for their inner psychopath and become the very monster they are fighting, Sarah certainly stood on the brink of that in T2). It's part of what makes TSCC so great. I believe Roxy, for one, isn't too impressed with the Ellison storyline but, conceptually, what Ellison was attempting is extremely interesting, IMHO (and it represents what is a deep problem which is very much a concern for AI research in the present day).

I've been watching season 1 again and am struck by how happy Ellison was back then. I think I'm with Roxy on not really liking his development in season 2. A) it was pretty stupid of him to try and explain morality in straightforward religious terms, and even more stupid of Weaver to let him try. B) with everything he's been through, Ellison is now incredibly dour and just plain not likeable. I'm hoping he learns from his mistakes, and gets some humility and/or happiness.

I don't think Weaver really understands the nuances of morality and religion and so forth well enough to be able to discern that what Ellison was teaching was overly simplistic and silly. It all probably seems very illogical an inefficient to her anyway so she probably just just thought that this sort of thing worked for humans, and it clearly seems to work for Ellison, so maybe he can teach it to a young, impressionable John Henry.

He also had the advantage that he already knew about machines from the future so he's mentally prepared for this concept and it wouldn't shock him or completely freak him out. And she knew he would likely keep his mouth shut since he didn't spill the beans about Cromartie even after the massacre.

Of course we knew she had a backup plan to, ahem, 'relocate' Mr. Ellison in case his tutalage was not working for John Henry.

I love it when John Henry and Ellison get to talking about God. When John Henry said, "Am I one of God's children?" It's for sure Ellison is struggling with the answer to that one!

Having read the Bible quite extensively thanks to "Religious Instruction" in my youth I'm at a loss to see why Ellison was being "overly simplistic and silly." The Bible contains various revealed by God axiomatic truths, one of which is that humans are made in God's image. "Human life is sacred" is the assertion of an axiom. John Henry would be perfectly on board with the idea that any system of logic must have axiomatic truths that have to be assumed to be correct.

Maybe you'd rather have them arguing The Prisoner's Dilemma. I find it hard to imagine how that gets you to arrive at John Henry seeing human life as sacred.

Remember "Mr Ferguson is Ill Today," Sarah and Cromartie in the car:
Sarah: "I'm not a murderer!"
Cromartie: "Who is?"
Cromartie is a Terminator. He terminates people. That's what he is.

I repeat, yet again, this whole area is a fantastically hard problem for the AI people trying to build a true machine intelligence, in no small part because we don't, in actual fact, understand how it goes down in humans. Ellison is exactly right in the conception of what he's attempting, I find it unsurprising his execution is unconvincing.

Simply put, I just felt like Ellison was spouting very basic dogma and when John Henry asked tough questions he didn't have answers.

Things like why human life is sacred. Because god made us? Well how about because our time is limited here and then we die. I think John Henry finally realized that when he was powered down. Except unlike him, we don't get to come back.

Also when John Henry said that the human brain was an amazing computer but inefficient because all of its information is lost when a person dies, well no it isn't. Every last bit of data isn't downloaded, of course, but people pass their ideas, thoughts, beliefs and feelings to other people and those in turn become a part of them and they pass them on and so forth. And we write things down and create lasting things.

All of human knowledge and advancements, including John Henry, exist because of those who came before us and the foundation we built. Ellison should have told him that.

I also felt like Ellison himself at times in the show was struggling with his faith and not entirely sure he even believed it himself.

Ellison was also there teaching John Henry but ultimately, I think it was just a job for him. I feel like the finale proved that. I don't think he ever completely viewed John Henry as a person (not human mind you, but person; I draw a distinction between the two).

I think John does view Cameron as a person. I even think at times Sarah views Cameron as a person, albeit begrudgingly.

When given an opportunity to go after John Henry, he declined saying "He's not my son". I think ultimately he was a paid Sunday school teacher and nothing more.

I was particularly disappointed when John Henry asked "is my life sacred" (or something like that) and Ellison says "we're going to talk about that" and then we never hear what Ellison actually said.

What made the whole thing particularly dumb was that Ellison gave JH very dogmatic answers... and then soon afterwards Weaver gave him access to the internet where he had access to a multitude of competing dogmas, none of which is obviously more correct than the others. I don't think "young and impressionable" works quite as well for a machine.

I'm also curious if JH was allowed to post on message boards and stuff. If he was he could have quickly made friends other than Ellison and Savanah.

>>>When given an opportunity to go after John Henry, he declined saying "He's not my son". I think ultimately he was a paid Sunday school teacher and nothing more.

I actually disagree here. His denial that JH didn't sound confident to me. He had never stopped to think about it before and the idea appalled him, but remember that Ellison DID want children. I think that the way Ellison talks down to John Henry (and the way John talks down to Cameron) was not because he saw him as nothing but a machine, but because he was desperately TRYING to keep thinking of him as a machine. I think we'll be seeing Ellison eventually coming to accept his relationship with John Henry.

I'd also like to point out that I think John Henry is far more of a person than Cameron is. Cameron was originally designed as a simple killing machine. JH's mental capacity is far greater, his slate was cleaner and was taught to interact with humans on a personal level from his very birt.

Well I think the thing is though that Ellison gave John Henry a real live person and a context to put that dogma to instead of just reading it. So this is where Ellison failed because you're right, he totally dodged that question about whether he life was sacred.

On Cameron, yes she was primarily created as a killing machine, though she also was meant to infiltrate so I'd imagine she'd have some rudimentary instruction on basic human interaction and in fact we know she can fake it really well when she wants (the pilot, Sampson and Delilah, Allison from Palmdale).

I've always thought since Allison from Palmdale that the Ts had figured out how to do a brain dump and actually transfered some of Allison's memory, but that's a total theory with no proof.

In any case, I'd say she's much more than your average T but yeah definitely no John Henry and doesn't have anywhere near the access to information that he has, though she arguably has more direct experience in human interaction and trying to understand human behavior.

Well, there's a bunch of us running with the hypothesis that the finale shows us Cameron is John Henry (and vice versa).

I don't buy this idea you could sell John Henry on human frailty thereby engendering compassion in him. Unless we, and John Henry, are all God's Children what matters it that Terminators kill humans? As Cromartie said to Sarah, "I'm not a murderer."

Yes, Ellison is a very religious man and he's struggling with his faith on so many levels. He's testing his faith against John Henry. It's as much about Ellison's struggle as it is JH.

Logic doesn't cut it. It really doesn't. I'm at a complete loss to understand why you can't grasp that obvious fact. You should try finding an actual psychopath and talking to him (I say "him" because males do appear to predominate) and then you'd surely see it... I think, since I'm at loss as to why this isn't trivially obvious to anyone.

The significant development for John Henry was the attachment to Savannah, whatever that exactly consists of, and whatever it was JH arrived at that himself. (Did JH/Cameron take Savannah to the future?)

"Obvious facts" and what people can and cannot grasp and why is all relative.

I don't have to make sense to you and you don't have to make sense to me. And that's okay.

I think I will skip talking to a psychopath, thanks. :p

I do agree though that it seems like John Henry's interactions with Savannah were probably his most significant developments at least in terms of interacting with and relating to humans.

Josh Friedman said John Henry is like a child in that he's not afraid to ask stupid questions.

Yes, I'd say it is satisfying - but creepy - to have the relationship between JH and Savannah. They're on a journey together, seeing the world for the first time thru the eyes of a child. Perhaps it's Savannah's acceptance and love of JH that will redeem him - and reaffirm Ellison's faith in God's work.

There's plenty of discussion of ethics systems based entirely on logic, and the article you linked to a while touched upon them. I agree that that article was missing the point that empathy is a genetic instinct that predates such a logical system, that doesn't change the fact that those logical systems CAN be derived independently. Cooperation is a more effective strategy than competition. Skynet was only hostile (and subsequently prejudiced) against humans because of the circumstances of its creation.

I actually think Weaver is a good example of an ethical sociopath at work. Obviously she has no compassion for the humans (or robots) she kills. But she's also clearly working towards cooperation with humanity, because it's more productive than constantly working to destroy humans for the sake of it. Her ethics is clearly machine-biased, but that's not much different than the typical human morality, which is general human (and often local tribe) biased. Historically humans felt little compunction against killing and enslaving "Other" humans and even modern humans are largely okay with killing animals for food, habitat, or even because they're in the way and just plain annoying).

Morality evolves as our ability to considers others part of ourselves increases. John Henry has come to see Savanah as important. Whether that's because of an inherent empathy (which, remember, is really nothing more than a byproduct of a complex sequences derived from a four letter language) or because she is interesting too him (which results from a complex sequence of a two letter language) does not strike me as relevant.

I think you're conflating two entirely different things here. It seems perfectly plausible to develop a robot soldier with parameters for "shoot" and "no shoot" targets built in - which is essentially what you're referring to when you appeal to morality based on systems of logic. It's why the law is often so useless and always requires a judge and jury to interpret the particular circumstances if justice is to be done. If what you say is true there is no need for any kind of decision-making in the legal process, simply the discovery of the facts pertinent to the parameters required for the algorithm that arrives at "guilty" or "innocent". The reason the jury exists is because that does not, and can, not work.

I'm referring to the actual underlying emotional context that drives humans to want to construct a system of morality. Yes, tribes would compete for scarce resources and kill as necessary but they have empathy and compassion and a sense of shared humanity to give them a context for their actions. Robots can never have that for they are simply machines. That morality is an accident of our biology, not an essential feature of the phenomenal universe, is my point (well, unless you believe in the Christian God, that is).

I very much agree John going into the future to learn how to be himself, importantly to learn from Derek and Kyle, makes good sense from character development POV. We really haven't seen him become someone special enough to lead the humans to victory, short of him simply being a meat-puppet for Cameron/JH doing all the heavy thinking (hinted at in Jesse's future).

In a way, of course, the time travel is magically fixing things. But it needs to do so in a way that causes the least damage to the logic they've followed with it thus far. I can buy into the idea that a time jump forward doesn't cause time branches so John has the interval between the time jump he made with the Weaverbot and whenever the next time bubble from a future is (but see below). Just how he's going to convince both himself and Sarah he really is Sarah's John ought to be interesting after the Derek-Jesse stand-off. In any case, I don't think he has to be in the same timeline as Sarah whilst they're apart, so long as he can secure the time coordinate of when he jumped from (from JH/Cameron).

Re JH/Cameron. Presently I'm thinking that Cameron was John Henry all along - isn't that what we saw revealed in the finale? She knew John Henry would take her chip to download into because she was in fact John Henry back from the future to bring herself to the future. Cameron/JH's secret agenda all along was to make sure she/he/it existed. The protecting John thing could, in fact, have been a completely bogus cover for that agenda. It makes "Self Made Man" even more useful. Cameron/JH's interest in studying history and very quick grasp of what was going on with Myron Stark, quite apart from showing that time jumps do go wrong and wreck your plans, is understandable because of what the finale revealed: Cameron/JH doesn't just jump in a time bubble, as John Henry he/she/it either invents one, or via information from the Weaverbot, makes and runs one. (John Henry downloaded into Cameron's chip and jumped just before Weaverbot and John I assume.)

"Self Made Man" comes into play again too: it's illogical for John to jump back to later than the Ziera Corp confrontation - why leave Sarah alone in the past when he's coming back anyway? However, plausibly the time jump can be off by a while but still in the same timeline given the possibility of error seen in "Self Made Man" (in the lecture theatre, Johnny is erasing the stuff on the whiteboard as fast as he writes it on). Again, both John and Sarah then need to be convinced they really are the respective "correct" John and Sarah. (Back to Derek vs Jesse - are we going to get Stephanie Jacobsen, and maybe Levin Rambin, back too?)

Re Sarah stepping back out of the time bubble. I'll need to watch it again but what I saw was that Sarah realised she wasn't likely going to be able to wrassle John out the time bubble and he was going because he was convinced, in the heat of the moment at least, he needed to follow Cameron. Once the bubble started forming they didn't exactly have time for an extended debate. Two reasons for Sarah stepping out: she wants to stop JD - and she's been promised by Kyle the future is not set - and that's all she knows to do. The important reason though is that she knows she has cancer. Going to the future will not help her or John. In the future it's unlikely she'll get access to oncology services and it will be too late to stop JD. Dying in the future will just mean another death for John to handle. It was quick-thinking on her part. And the resigned way she said it (to me) seemed like, "I wish I could have said goodbye properly." I think, logically, it must be that Sarah has cancer - jumping over the time of her death didn't cure whatever it was gave her cancer unless it somehow excused her from exposure to a carcinogen. But she then ended up at a nuke plant anyway. Seems to me what would make no sense is that the time jump (in the bank) would magically make Sarah's cancer disappear.

Meantime, Sarah's in deep doodoo for sure: she's on the run, having escaped jail in a monstrous prison break, then trashed Ziera Corp with the result there are sundry people missing. She should have stayed in the bubble!

>>I don't think he has to be in the same timeline as Sarah whilst they're apart, so long as he can secure the time coordinate of when he jumped from (from JH/Cameron).

It really does NOT make any sense for jumping forward to produce a new timeline. Or rather it might, but not in a way we care about. It would only produce two new timelines, both beginning from the moment when John appears in 2027ish. One version where he appeared, one where he didn't. In any case there's no reason to randomly create an entirely new timeline where Sarah didn't exist. Everything that didn't get changed would stay the same.

>>Re JH/Cameron. Presently I'm thinking that Cameron was John Henry all along

I've been toying with that theory as well, or variations of it. We see Cameron's original creation which doesn't seem to mesh with her also being John Henry but the whole thing is so vague they could really go any direction with it. I also wondered for a while if every time Cameron said "Future John" she was actually referring to John Henry, but as I'm rewatching she seems to specify she does in fact mean Dekker's John. "He's not John. Not yet." Unless Cameron is lying there, but then she could be lying about everything.

>>>Re Sarah stepping back out of the time bubble.

I don't think you and Roxy are disagreeing here. Did anyone actually claim Sarah stepped into the bubble before she stepped out of it?

I'm not saying jumping forward is producing a new timeline for Sarah (logically it doesn't appear to require to, anyway) - but John could be jumping into a Weaverbot, JH/Cameron's timeline rather than just simply into his (and Sarah's) future timeline.

BTW... ponder on this one on the Tree of Woe...

John Henry remarked that the flaw in humans was that they can't be downloaded into a new medium. In T1, Skynet invented time travel and tried to change the timelines. But, it turns out, what you end up doing is spawning multiple timelines. So what does it really get you, anywhen?

Well, yes it does get you the win but only if you are Skynet. Skynet can send out time travellers until it has constructed that one perfect timeline, then download all its selves into the God-machine in that one perfect timeline. So Skynet - or John Henry/Cameron if that defeats (or merges) with Skynet and assumes the mantle of uberAI... Skynet is God.

Just as the Weaverbot told John Henry. How frakking cool is that for a finale?

You're a little scary, sir :D I don't think they'll go that way, but that's a horrifying thought.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Born to Fail - part 1

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject