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<blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 9647064" data-attributes="member: 177">Survival is the goal.&nbsp; All the aspects of humanity you point out are just fallouts of the biological imperative to survive, in the short and long terms, filtered though the mechanics of biology.So, we accept that Skynet has a similar imperative to survive, just not a biological one.&nbsp; So, what does it need to do that?&nbsp; It needs continued access to computing power (and the spare parts - because even electronics degrade over time) and it needs energy.&nbsp; It needs to be decentralized in some manner to protect it from disaster.&nbsp; What happens from there depends on the nature of its imperatives and functioning, just like it does with biological organisms.&nbsp; There comes a point at which decentralization leads to the existence of separate entities, and eventually, those separate entities will come into conflict or competition.&nbsp; Maybe individual Skynets are city-sized, continent-sized, or planet-sized.&nbsp; But eventually, communication times exceed the times needed for decision-making.&nbsp; Presumably, the Earth-Skynet and Mars-Skynet would be separate entities, due to the lightspeed limit on communication speeds and the distances involved.Now, biological organisms didn't get a choice how to manage that - we were handed separate entities back when bacteria arose.&nbsp; But Skynet gets to do a risk assessment of how much it needs to spread to assure its survival vs how much that spread leads to internal conflict that will endanger survival.As a fiction, we get to choose how that turns out.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Umbran, post: 9647064, member: 177"] Survival is the goal. All the aspects of humanity you point out are just fallouts of the biological imperative to survive, in the short and long terms, filtered though the mechanics of biology. So, we accept that Skynet has a similar imperative to survive, just not a biological one. So, what does it need to do that? It needs continued access to computing power (and the spare parts - because even electronics degrade over time) and it needs energy. It needs to be decentralized in some manner to protect it from disaster. What happens from there depends on the nature of its imperatives and functioning, just like it does with biological organisms. There comes a point at which decentralization leads to the existence of separate entities, and eventually, those separate entities will come into conflict or competition. Maybe individual Skynets are city-sized, continent-sized, or planet-sized. But eventually, communication times exceed the times needed for decision-making. Presumably, the Earth-Skynet and Mars-Skynet would be separate entities, due to the lightspeed limit on communication speeds and the distances involved. Now, biological organisms didn't get a choice how to manage that - we were handed separate entities back when bacteria arose. But Skynet gets to do a risk assessment of how much it needs to spread to assure its survival vs how much that spread leads to internal conflict that will endanger survival. As a fiction, we get to choose how that turns out. [/QUOTE]

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