A few days back I found myself sitting in Cafe Noir(an awesome cafe in UB city) having an amazing conversation with a friend. We were discussing a script that I had written and considering it was just the second draft it had a lot of unresolved debatable ideas in it.

To put it in short(without revealing too much of the plot) we were discussing about how machines would behave if they one day could start thinking.

My first question was how would we define “thinking”. If thinking is show of intelligence then anything that can deduce logic is capable of thinking. That would mean your smart phone can think too. Calculators can do logic but we cant say they think, computers can recommend items based on your taste but can they think? I guess what I am getting at is thinking requires an additional component of free will. To be able to decide what is good for yourself and make choices accordingly.

But that depends on how machines or for that matter humans think… That is a topic for another post :D

Back to the main point, the above brings us to an interesting problem, if machines could think would it be possible to manipulate one like a human?

I just finished watching the first season of “House of Cards” and trust me its an amazing introspection into motives and manipulation. People are generally manipulated by their sins: greed, fear, lust, etc. (you get the drift).

Machines on the other hand dont seem like they would succumb to greed or lust. Fear is possibly the most interesting motive. In the Matrix the lack of power to keep the machines running was a powerful driving force to the decisions made by the machines. That seems like a very logical choice for machines, they dont want to be shutdown. Its a bit like the human fear of dying.

That brings us to the basic plots of The Matrix & Terminator: Man creates highly capable machines and realizes that they are more powerful than he intended. Concerned that he cant control them he decides to shut them down and they fight back… What happens next depends on when you want to tell your story :)

I cant go into the plot of my story but I can tell you its exciting enough to keep me up at night :)