That’s just a really, really cool concept to me it’s a powerful message.

What’s really fascinating is that the optimal form that this robot has chosen to kill human beings is another human being. You can program a machine to learn how to do that optimally. What’s interesting to me from a roboticist’s perspective is that it’s just a problem like any other – killing people. They learned how to camouflage themselves, and then human beings became more scarce and smarter, so the robots actually had to begin to learn how to mimic us. The robots initially were just landmines, they were very simple things. The story is primarily concerned with ‘How do you tell a human from a robot?’ But what I found most interesting about it was that it was an apocalyptic future, in which human beings had built machines not to kill other human beings, but to learn how to kill other human beings. I don’t know the complete provenance, but there is no way that Second Variety didn’t have some impact on the whole Terminator world.

Second Variety is what I just described almost exactly. Second Variety is… OK, have you ever seen The Terminator? You know that part at the very beginning – it’s this apocalyptic future and there are these humanoid cyborgs with red glowing eyes marching over a field of human skulls, spraying everything down with these Gatling guns, and the humans are being chased around like rats? Then of course it cuts to Los Angeles and you’re thinking ‘Damn! I wanted to see that movie.’ Well this is that movie. Tell me about your first choice, a short story dating from 1953 called Second Variety by Philip K Dick. Foreign Policy & International Relations.

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