4 Sci-Fi Villains Who Could Actually Happen (And 4 That Totally Couldn't)

3. Terminator/Skynet - The Terminator

You know Skynet? Totally a thing.

According to a leak, the NSA actually use their own version of Skynet to monitor terrorist activity and, yes, they called it Skynet too.

Aside from a government in-joke, the possibility of autonomous deadly combat robots is becoming more and more plausible. The arguments for them are that they reduce military casualties on the battlefield by reducing the need to put real humans in combat zones. By giving them the ability to think for themselves, you even do away with the need to manually control them, and to ensure they have all of the necessary information to carry out their missions, you could always hook them up with your intelligent surveillance system. Skynet, for example.

As you can imagine, the arguments against autonomous deadly combat robots generally include how horrible all the death is. You also run into problems with programming a machine to make moral decisions about taking human life, as well as the obvious risk that they develop self-awareness and overthrow mankind.