Posted by Damien [24.241.234.88 - c24.241.234.88.jvl.wi.charter.com] on 08 July 2003 at 16.55.47 ZuluTime:

In Reply to: Re: RE: The new version posted by Gremlin on 04 July 2003 at 00.44.35 ZuluTime:

After watching the new film, I got to thinking on the subject of influencing the past and changing the present. Here's the paradox I came up with: In a sense, the machines caused John Connor to start the resistance. Think about it for a second, they sent back three units now to kill John Connor, they failed in their task. What they did do, though, is set the scene up so that John Connor A) had quite a substantial amount of information on both skynet and the coming war, and B) was in a safe location during the nuclear exchange.

Now, if the machines had never tried to send the terminators back in time to try and kill him, he would never have known about them, would not have been in a safe location during the exchange (I can't remember the exact setting of the movies, but it looked like he lived in an inner city, a very likely target for a nuke). Even if he somehow survived the holocaust, he would be just as ignorant of the cause as everyone else. So, in a sense, skynet caused the resistance by it's attempts to 'uncause' it.

So the question remains, if this AI is smart enough to create a virus to gradually set up a scene in which it can take control of all the world's computers and other machines; why isn't it smart enough to comprehend a simple time-travel paradox that a high school grad like me could figure out?