Sounds like the often encountered standard SciFi movie plot.

Automated systems are already an economic threat to people, especially minimum wage earners. If your job can be replaced by a machine it will be replaced by a machine. That'll happen before the machine uprising.

-Blast, giving his two cents.

I completely agree!!!!

The prerequisite for mechanized sentience is AI. Hopefully those who develop it will incorporate Asimov's three rules of robotics. If not, we will get skynet.

I can tell you exactly when computers will get self awareness: never.
They don't have minds. A computer is a lot of switches that can be on or off and that's all they are. Ask any computer bod. They are as able to think, as a big box of light switches is able to become the terminator. Artificial Intelligence doesn't exist. They can only pretend to have ideas by saying what a human being has told them to.
qjs

I don't know whether computers will ever become aware, but we are also just a bunch of switches that can be on or off. Sure, we're built of organic matter, but at the end we rely on an electrical system to think. There are computers built from organic matter, by the way. Experimental stuff in development.

What I haven't figured out is what makes sentience. I know I have a brain (at least allegedly) and my mind is the software that runs on that hardware (see above), but I cannot explain how my cerebral cortex, or some other part or combination of parts of my brain allows sentience to happen.

Computers as they are now do not have minds and even the very best Turing Test-passing AI cannot be said to be sentient. Until we figure out what makes humans sentient it strikes me as being unlikely that we'll be able to create sentient computers.

Is true sentience required to get a Skynet situation? Couldn't a highly sophisticated, machine-learning system crunch the numbers and go through its algorithms and decide that wiping out humanity is the most logical outcome without requiring self-awareness? Was the WOPR in War Games sentient? It learned, but I would be hesitant to say it was sentient.

Actually, the common denominator in all those stories seems to be the ability of said computer system to control our nuclear arsenal and then wipe us out. I was just reading an article a couple weeks ago about the technology in one of our Minutemen III launch silos. The technology is so old down there that they are still transferring data on 8-inch floppy disks! I don't think a sentient software program will be able to sneak into that computer system within the storage capacity of an 8-inch floppy.

Edit: Actually, come to think of it, the WOPR almost blew up the world and it didn't even realize that it wasn't playing a game!

Let's ask HAL