Editing 1978: Congressional Testimony

[[Megan]] and [[Cueball]] are discussing {{w|Facebook}} CEO {{w|Mark Zuckerberg|Mark Zuckerberg's}} upcoming {{w|United States congressional hearing|testimony before Congress}}. The prepared testimony was released on the day this comic was released--see ''[https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/09/congress-released-mark-zuckerbergs-prepared-testimony-ahead-of-wednesdays-hearing.html Congress releases Mark Zuckerberg's prepared testimony ahead of Wednesday's hearing]''. Facebook is facing questions on the {{w|Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal}} involving the collection of personal information of up to 87 million Facebook users by the political targeting firm Cambridge Analytica.

Megan then starts talking about re-watching ''{{w|The Terminator}}''. The plot of the film concerns a killer robot, sent back from a post-apocalyptic future on an assassination mission. The premise of the film is that a future computer system, known as {{w|Skynet (Terminator)|Skynet}}, was built to control America's nuclear weapons systems. This computer system became self aware and attempted to kill off humanity. The eponymous Terminator was sent back in time to prevent the birth of a human resistance leader, by killing his mother before he was born. In the movie, the Terminator looked up the mother's name (Sarah Connor) in the {{w|phone book}} of a {{w|phone booth}} to find her address.  

This film was one of the defining depictions of malicious and dangerous artificial intelligence in American popular culture. The premise of the original film was that the system achieved self-awareness and launched its initial attacks in the 1990's (though later entries in the franchise altered this timeline). Going by the first film, we would expect AI to already threaten humanity. Instead, the aforementioned congressional hearings suggest that the technological threats come instead from social media companies, with their mass collection of private information.  

Megan comments on the irony of real life versus fictional expectations. While we do currently make computer-controlled weaponry and humanoid robots, neither appears to present a real danger to the average person (at least, not yet). It likely seemed logical that the greatest danger would be a future weapons system, which could be said to have "evolved" from weapons of the past. By the same token, telephone directories could be seen as the forerunner of modern social media, such as Facebook, (in that they constituted a collection of personal information, used to allow people to contact and communicate with one another). While the film featured a phone book as a plot point (and shows it being used maliciously), the existence of the directory itself wasn't treated as a threat. Megan and Cueball are struck by the fact that the technological descendants of phone directories appear to be more dangerous than the weapons and robotic technologies we've developed

The title text makes the claim that {{w|James Cameron}}, who directed the first two films, was planning to make a third movie in the 1990s, which would have been the really prophetic one (i.e. the one that would have mirrored our present day most closely). Therefore, Skynet, having seen the result of this movie, wished to prevent the movie from ever being made, sending yet another robot back in time to prevent Cameron from directing it. Instead, ''{{w|Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines}}'' was released in 2003 and directed by {{w|Jonathan Mostow}}. Although Cameron is credited for writing it, he only created the characters. Since then three other movies have been made, all with different directors, and all critically panned compared to the Cameron films.