Terminator vs Windows Updates

Whenever I read or watch science fiction about artificial intelligence taking over the world (like the Terminator series), or read articles worrying about the possibility with things like self-driving cars, I have to laugh,

It’s not going to happen. In the last week:

-My MacBook Air corrupted its OS, and I had to reinstall everything from scratch before I could make paperback editions of SEVENFOLD SWORD: TOWER and MALISON: DRAGON CURSE.

-I was updating SEVENFOLD SWORD: SERPENT with a bonus chapter for TOWER, and for some reason, the software decided to overwrite Chapter 6 with the table of contents. Fortunately, I had many backups, but I had to dump the file and start over.

-On my desktop computer, my video card driver stops working at random for no discernible reason.

-Facebook went down today a bunch of times.

-Amazon.com is suddenly inaccessible to users outside the US (I think this actually began in October), and no one at Amazon has been able to figure out why.

-I needed to find my way to a location in a city I haven’t visited before. Instead of sending me on a straight line via the freeway, the GPS sent me through a maze of residential neighborhoods, and finally got stuck in a loop, apparently confused by a frontage road.

So, sure. Artificial intelligence is totally going take over the world. Yup. Any minute now.

Skynet’s reign of terror would last until the first time it tried to install updates and got caught in a reboot loop. Or it would launch a missile at a major metropolitan area, and the missile would get confused the first time it encountered a frontage road and fly in circles until its fuel ran out.

-JM