Letter in the FT: Of Terminators and Time Lords (and corporate technodomination)

Whoop! Another letter in the Financial Times.

Your editorial “The Science of Successful Succession” (FT 4 November) ponders the possibility of digital overlords running companies.

In 1984 James Cameron’s film “The Terminator” gave us “Skynet”, a sentient computer that started World War 3 rather than be switched off.

Eleven years earlier the BBC’s Time Lord Doctor Who (then played by Jon Pertwee) battled the nefarious multinational “Global Chemicals”  in Wales.  The company was secretly run by a supercomputer “Biomorphic Organisational Systems Supervisor. (“BOSS”). Hiding behind a human underling, BOSS was ‘logically’ disposing of toxic waste by tipping it into recently shuttered coal mines, since this was cheaper than proper reprocessing. The deadly infections, maggots and giant flies were mere “negative externalities”, unworthy of computation.

Pure science-fiction, of course…