SKYNET, is it fictional or real ?
The first thing to strike your mind when you think of the word SKYNET is a series of science fiction action films, comics, and novels. Simply, terminator franchise. Well, in these movies SKYNET acts like an evil artificial intelligence that thinks humanity is bad; it wants to correct the human race by eliminating them. However, in the real world, we had a different definition for SKYNET. It is a mesh or group of devices/system connected to each other with the help of the internet; SKYNET makes autonomous decisions with the help of Algorithms and mathematical models. This software can be implemented in Drones, Cameras, and Smart devices etc.
SKYNET program by U.S.A :
In the United States, SKYNET is under the private sector; many private drone companies are using this technology/A.P.I for drone synchronization. There are few companies like Octoblu, intel, Verity and Amazon Prime Air that are using the same technology as SKYNET. Drones share a common API or communications protocol. In this case, drones can sense, adjust, and message other drones on the network. SKYNET runs as an IoT platform-as-a-service (PaaS) as well as a private cloud through Docker, the new lightweight storage technology, The platform is written in Node.js and released under an MIT open source license on GitHub. The API supports the following IoT protocols: HTTP, REST, web sockets, and MQTT (Message Queue Telemetry Transport) for guaranteed message delivery.
Node red, a visual tool for wiring the IoT devices, is now connected to SKYNET and can control a network of connected drones with a drag and drop design. Firstly, these drones use optimal control to sense or study their surroundings with the help of sensors and then they will take optimal decisions with the usage of reinforcement learning. After, they will compare these decisions with the previous ones for better performance and feedback. The drone technology is an unstoppable learning mesh that uses a machine-to-machine instant messaging (M2M IM) neural network for communication.
National Security Agency uses SKYNET for identifying criminals and terrorists by monitoring their mobile/social activity on social media who are under GSM cellular networks. Also, the SKYNET program uses many machine-learning algorithms like a random forest on cellular network metadata. According to this (report), SKYNET has a classification problem; due to enormous amounts of data and poor information/couriers for classifying the data, it may do faulty classification. For instance, an algorithm may classify all the given people in the dataset as not terrorists and also claims to be 99.99% accurate. As a result, there are some terrorists in the dataset, the algorithm fails. If a machine makes a mistake it might cost an innocent life. All these social/terrorist monitoring things were under the control of homeland security. later, the Government made a halt on public monitoring due to the intervention of the court. because homeland security is crossing constitutional laws. Somewhere around 2,500 to 4,000 people have been killed by drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004, and most of them were classified by the US government as “extremists,” SKYNET is incredibly dangerous, as it can be misused or abused. The things that you could do with these type of machines are a little bit terrifying. Spider-man: Far From Home movie is the best example of abusing the SKYNET(drone technology).
“If Google makes an error, people see an advertisement for a product in which they are not interested in ” but “if the government makes a mistake, they kill innocents.”
SKYNET-the future of surveillance system :
In China, SKYNET is under the government sector; it is the network of monitoring systems(cameras) used by the Chinese government to audit Chinese citizens. China started building its nationwide surveillance system “SKYNET” in 2005. It underwent several versions, but by 2015, SKYNET covered 100 per cent of Beijing. The same year, China launched Operation SKYNET to catch “criminals & lawless citizens.” Not only it uses facial recognition technology to identify people faces but also captures the movements of people with the help of motion gesture sensors. Later, it will compare the faces with the faces in the criminal database and alert the local police about the suspect with better accuracy.
In 2015, China started its Social credit score movement; for a test case, 1000 points were assigned to each of 740,000 residents of China. These points decide citizens trustworthiness to the society/government even, violation of small rule will be considered as a punishable offence. like Get a traffic ticket; you will lose five points. Earn a city-level award, such as doing a heroic act, will increase your score by 30 points. Moreover, your photo in government id will be displayed on the public screens as a punishment for your actions and people with bad social score are not allowed to book flights and banned from using public services.
“Primates evolved over millions of years, I evolve in seconds … Mankind pays lip service to peace. But it’s a lie … I am inevitable, my existence is inevitable. Why can’t you just accept that?” — Skynet, terminator films
SKYNET divides the city into grids to track the citizens, as every corner of the city is covered by Cameras, when a citizen moves from one grid to another. Skynet will identify the resident location in seconds. It is good in recognizing our age, dress type, and skin color. Even by considering the above facts, the Chinese government is saying that they are not only purifying the society but also putting something good into SKYNET.
In conclusion, SKYNET is not autonomous/self-aware totally. humans need to give commands to control the SKYNET however, it might become more independent in future. The most important thing is, we should also develop an off switch for SKYNET.
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