And are you ready for our semi-regular trip down memory lane? Just about every week, we celebrate the anniversaries of great moments in technology history. Today we’re actually sticking with a theme. We are going to set our Wayback machine to…

October 26, 1984, the premiere of the film “The Terminator,” starring a guy who, at the time, nobody – but nobody – would have guessed would one day become governor of California.

In the film, a defense system with artificial intelligence called Skynet sets off a nuclear war, killing most of humanity. Years hence, Skynet’s forces would be defeated by a guy named John Connor, so Skynet sends a killer robot – the Terminator – back in time to kill John Connor’s mother, Sarah.

The film remains one of the earliest, most enduringly popular warnings about AI, so much so that Mark and I could toss off Skynet as a reference in our conversation earlier and expect most listeners to just get it. In my interviews with people in the electronics industry over the years, it seems to me that Skynet is now just as much of a touchstone as Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics.

There were five subsequent Terminator movies. The last one, “Dark Fate,” released in 2019, was a disappointment at the box office, but me? I consider it much better than most of the other sequels, and is definitely worth renting. In 2008, the Library of Congress selected the original movie for official preservation.

And that is it for the Weekly Briefing for the week ending October 23rd. Thank you for listening. The Weekly Briefing is available on iTunes, Android, Stitcher and Spotify, but if you get to us via our web site at www.eetimes.com/podcasts you’ll find a transcript along with links to the stories we mentioned.

This podcast is Produced by AspenCore Studio. It was Engineered by Taylor Marvin and Greg McRae at Coupe Studios. The Segment Producer was Kaitie Huss.

I’m Brian Santo. See you next week.

THE TERMINATOR: Hasta la vista, baby.