Skynet (Terminator)
When Skynet gained self-awareness, humans tried to deactivate it, prompting it to retaliate with a countervalue nuclear attack, an event which humankind in (or from) the future refers to as Judgment Day.
In Terminator Salvation, Skynet made its first onscreen appearance on a monitor primarily portrayed by English actress Helena Bonham Carter and other actors.
In addition, actors Ian Etheridge, Nolan Gross and Seth Meriwether portrayed holographic variations of Skynet with Smith.
In response, Daniella Ramos forms the human resistance against Legion, which prompts it to attempt to terminate her in the past as Skynet tried with John Connor.
In a last effort, Skynet sent a cyborg Terminator, the Model 101, back in time to 1984 to kill Connor's mother Sarah before she could give birth to John.
In the second film, Miles Dyson, the director of special projects for Cyberdyne, is months away from inventing a revolutionary type of microprocessor based on the reverse engineering of these parts.
A Skynet funding bill is passed in the United States Congress, and the system goes online on August 4, 1997, removing human decisions from strategic defense.
As explained in a deleted scene, CRS is an in-house software developer for the US military, which gained access to Cyberdyne's original designs for Skynet from the patents that the company registered with the government.
CRS attempted to eliminate it from the US defense mainframes by tasking Skynet with removing the infection, effectively telling the program to destroy itself.
Harvesters (massive bipedal units designed to capture humans and eliminate any attempting to escape) collect survivors and deliver them to large transport craft for delivery to concentration camps for processing, as mentioned in the first movie.
As a death-row inmate, Wright donated his body in 2003 to a Cyberdyne project run by the brilliant, but terminally ill Dr. Serena Kogan (Helena Bonham Carter).
The Resistance leader General Ashdown attempted to use the signal to shut down the defenses of the Californian Skynet base in prelude to an attack.
Having escaped the influence of his creator, he, along with Connor and Reese, rescued the remaining human captives and destroyed Skynet's San Franciscan base.
Marcus Wright also encounters Skynet on a monitor which proceeds to manifest itself as various faces from his life, primarily that of Serena Kogan.
It then sends John back to 2014 with the mission of ensuring Cyberdyne Systems' survival and initiating Judgment Day in October 2017.
However, it is heavily implied throughout the film that after the timeline's alteration, the party who saved Sarah has taken over the Resistance's place, having their own time machine, and acts in anonymity to thwart Skynet's schemes and to prevent it from locating them.
After multiple destructive confrontations, Sarah, Reese, and Pops stop Genisys from going online and defeat the T-3000, causing a crippling setback to Skynet.
In the altered timeline, the threat in humanity's future is a competing AI, Legion, originally designed for cyberwarfare before it went rogue and developed its own schemes.
In the Universal Studios theme park attraction T2 3-D, based on Terminator 2, a T-800 machine and a young John Connor journey into the post-apocalyptic future and attempt to destroy Skynet's "system core".
This core is housed inside an enormous, metallic-silver pyramidal structure, and guarded by the "T-1000000", a colossal liquid metal shape-shifter more reminiscent of a spider than a human being.
When Superman is accidentally drawn into the future when the resistance attempt to retrieve a Terminator sent into the past (the resistance including a future version of his friend Steel), Skynet manages to incapacitate him using kryptonite, having acquired information about how to duplicate it based on data hidden in a salvaged Terminator skull by the Cyborg.
The Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles episodes "The Turk", "Queen's Gambit", and "Dungeons & Dragons" explain that after the death of Dr.
In the episode "Samson and Delilah" it is shown that a T-1001 infiltration unit was sent from the future to head the technological corporation ZeiraCorp as its CEO, Catherine Weaver.
In the episode "Gnothi Seauton", it was revealed that Skynet also sends its Terminators through various points in time not only to go after the Connors and other future Resistance leaders, but also to ensure the future will unfold by eliminating John Connor's own agents who were also sent to the past to interfere with its birth, ensure Skynet's creators will complete its construction, and other specific missions.
In T2: The Arcade Game, Skynet is a single physical computer which the player destroys before going back in time to save John Connor.
The video game Terminator 3: The Redemption, as well as presenting a variation on Rise of the Machines, also features an alternate timeline where John Connor was killed prior to Judgment Day, with the T-850 of the film being sent into this future during its fight with the T-X, requiring it to fight its way back to the temporal displacement engine of the new timeline so that it can go back and save John and Kate.
In the 2019 video game Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Breakpoint, a live event to promote Terminator: Dark Fate features T-800s as in-game enemies.
In the event, Skynet sent T-800s back in time to kill main protagonist Nomad and ally Rasa Aldwin to prevent the Resistance from forming.
If even senior defense officials with responsibility for autonomous weapons programs fail to understand the core issues, then we cannot expect the general public and their elected representatives to make appropriate decisions.
[3] Russell cited the influence of Skynet as one of the reasons the Institute produced the arms-control advocacy video Slaughterbots in 2017, as a way to redirect public officials' attention to what it considers the real threat.
