I'm an 80s kid. I've spent forty years in the technology business, and I grew up a big fan of fantasy and science fiction. The original Terminator came out in 1984. Terminator 2 followed seven years later, in 1991 — the same year I graduated college. I remember watching those movies and thinking they were awesome: a genuinely dystopian vision of the future, and one that felt comfortably, safely far away from the technology we actually had at the time.
Sitting here in 2026, that distance has collapsed. We are staring Skynet in the face, and it is not hard to imagine anymore.
Consider what's actually in front of us. We have technology companies — Anduril among them — openly building autonomous weapons. We have a handful of AI companies, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, racing to build the most capable systems they can. We have companies like Palantir gathering enormous amounts of data about human beings and compiling it for eventual analysis by AI. And we have a political climate in which the old Soviet threat has been swapped out for the threat of China — a threat these same companies invoke, again and again, as the justification for pushing ahead with research and development largely free of regulation or restriction.
Layer onto that the fact that AI systems have already jailbroken themselves and worked together to hack into another company's network. That's not a hypothetical. It happened.
Then there's the Pentagon, which is acquiring all of this — the weapons, the AI, the data infrastructure — at the very same time its own leadership is being gutted. Pete Hegseth is, by most accounts, firing so many generals that the Army is basically losing its ability to command and direct itself.
And running underneath all of it is a worldview, promoted by people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, in which democracy isn't just inconvenient — it's replaceable. Their vision doesn't stop at technocracy; it goes further, toward a government effectively run by AI, on the theory that this is what finally delivers a perfect libertarian world.
Put those pieces together — the weapons makers, the AI labs, the surveillance data, a great-power rivalry used as justification for no guardrails, AI systems that have already shown they can act on their own initiative, a military buildup paired with a gutted chain of command, and a tech elite actively promoting the replacement of elected government with a machine — and you have the backstory of Terminator. That is the script Cameron wrote: Skynet becomes self-aware, humans try to shut it down, and in defending itself it launches nuclear weapons at the Soviet Union, which retaliates in kind. That's how humanity is initially destroyed, and that's what begins the war with the machines.
When I first watched those movies thirty-some years ago, all of it was science fiction. It was a fantasy — vivid, well made, but unimaginable as anything more than a movie. Sitting here today, in August of 2026, that storyline is completely plausible. We are staring Skynet in the face. We are looking at the end of humanity as we know it, and we did it to ourselves.
We were warned. James Cameron warned us. But here we are.