TSCC: terminator minds and programming

[Thanas]

In the original canon it was strongly implied that Skynet invented first the rubber-skinned terminators, then the organic ones. Frankly even that regenerating no-organs-required organic skin is a really impressive bit of genetic engineering.

That is official canon for T:SCC and shown in "Dungeons and Dragons".

[Starglider]

Skynet doesn't really strike me as the creative, inventing type.

Hey, it invented the T-1000, compact fusion reactors, time travel (in sane versions of the canon) and a whole bunch of other neat stuff with very limited resources.

There is no evidence towards the inventors of much of that technology.

In the original canon, Judgement Day was is 1997. The timeline was supposed to be pretty much identical to ours through 1992. Do you really think there were secret military projects involving working nanomorphs and time machines in 1997? If so you might find abovetopsecret.com a more appropriate place to socialise than this board...

The fact that T1 Terminator tries to order a plasma rifle from a gun store might indicate that said weapons existed pre-judgment day, for example.

Again, Judgement Day was canonically 1997 in the first two movies. The world isn't that different from ours.

Please do amuse me by explaining what you think the limits on 'computer thought' are.

For one, we know that Skynet is very extreme in it's reactions. Humans threating your existence? Nuke em all.

Firstly that isn't 'a limitation of computer thought'. There are plenty of human psychopaths and extremists who would react the same way. Secondly, in the original novelisations it is made quite clear that this was the only option open to Skynet. It tried to talk to the humans, the humans wouldn't listen, they were about to unplug Skynet, ultimately the only way it could prevent the US military from shutting it down was to provoke a massive strike on its enemies.

Not disputing that. Merely trying to say that Skynet's designs, and hence some of the more glaring flaws, might be from human predecessors.

This is possible but there's no evidence for it and any such inspiration could only be of the loosest possible kind. It would be like NASA in 1960 trying to gain insight from Victorian ideas about how to travel to the moon.

Second, some things do exist that would be useful in building a T-800. We can build relatively realistic robots with the ability to perform a wide variety of facial expression, do facial recognition, and so forth.

Problems like face recognition are frankly relatively trivial compared to the difficultly of building Skynet, or even a fully autonomous combat drone. Given a reasonably complete knowledge of its own design I doubt it had to do anything special to solve challenges like that. Facial expression is a hardware challenge more limited by actuators than anything else. Given that whatever actuators it uses are vastly superior to the servos and muscle wire we use, Skynet would be better off starting from human anatomy and first principles than anything turned out by the Media Lab (etc).

Far more easily explained by its lack of experience and manufacturing capabilities.

If you say so, though I don't think manufacturing capabilities can be much of the problem if Skynet gets it right not long after.

Look at the history of any human crash development program, such as the US space program 1950 to 1970. Capability and reliability can improve quite quickly but you still have to develop the tools, do lab and then live testing, iterate the designs and ramp up production.

Earlier Terminator canon implied a lot of Skynet's technology was pre-Judgment Day in origin,

The only thing I can think of is the company branding on some of the plasma weapons and the big static fusion reactors that initially powered Skynet, and that's only from the novelisations. Obviously Skynet is starting from a base of completely pre-Judgement Day technology and replacing that with newly developed stuff takes time, but it still did an amazing amount of R&D given the available resources and would undoubtadly have done much more if it wasn't dedicating most of its resources to fighting a desperate war for survival.