I'll Be Back: 40 Years of The Terminator

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BBC Radio 4 - I'll Be Back: 40 Years of The Terminator

Beth Singler explores the creation and enduring vision of The Terminator's AI prophecy.

Beth Singler explores the creation and enduring influence of The Terminator with producer Gale Anne Hurd and others. Its nightmare scenario of AI doom still resonates and provokes.

"It was the machines, Sarah...a new order of intelligence. Decided our fate in a microsecond: extermination." So says Kyle Reese, time travelling freedom fighter in The Terminator. Released in the perfectly fitting year of 1984, The Terminator was a low budget, relentless slice of science fiction noir, drawing on years of pulp sf to conjure a future nightmare of humanity hunted to near extinction by the machines it created. In 2029, just 5 years away now,
Arnold Schwarzenegger's unstoppable cyborg killer is sent back to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor, the yet to be mother of humanities saviour to come. Fate, redemption & the destructive power of A.I. all made in the analogue age but still influencing the way many imagine our new age of Artificial Intelligence.

Professor Beth Singler re-visits the making of the film with producer Gale Anne Hurd and explores its lasting influence. Forty years on, and the circular self-contained time travel plot of The Terminator has been cracked wide open letting out alternative timelines and delayed apocalypses: more films, a television show, graphic novels, comics, video games, theme park rides and even memes have spread versions of the original robopocalypse. More than that, the first Terminator has given us a vocabulary and a vision for the dangers of Artificial Intelligence.

With the voices of Gale Anne Hurd, vfx guru Paul Franklin, Sean French- author of the BFI classic , AI researcher & writer Eliezer Yudkowsky & UCL's professor of science & technology, Jack Stilgoe. James Cameron extract courtesy of BAFTA.
Producer- Mark Burman

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