Sam Trenholme’s blog

Re-watching Terminator 2

July 11, 2026

I re-watched Terminator 2 today.

Rewatching Terminator 2

I saw “Terminator 2” when it first came out, and just re-watched it in light of the fact that AI is now real. In the movie, they were about 25 years more optimistic about AI becoming real than what happened in the real world; AI was viable in 1997 in the movie, but in real life it didn’t become viable until 2023 or 2024, when people starting using ChatGPT as a free therapist.

Also, AI was developed by the military in the movie,¹ but while the military has helped fund AI development, it has been created by and funded in the private sector.

Yes, this movie describes one risk of AI: It may decide to kill us. Whether or not that is a real risk is still up in the air, but what has happened is that AI is causing massive economic damage, completely destroying the tech industry and highly paid computer programmers.

I remember being a kid working at a gas station, slowly saving up enough money to buy a car, and being on the internet for hours every night, learning computers and technology to get out of the trap of only being able to work in a gas station. Finally, I saved up enough to buy an old car, had a friend of a friend who worked for a place that was hiring, and got my foot in the door by working as tech support for the then nascent internet industry in Silicon Valley. From there, I slowly became a highly paid software developer.

With AI taking over everything, people these days no longer have that opportunity. AI is eating away at the middle class, and today’s generation of talented artists, musicians, and computer programmers are having their jobs being taken away from them by AI agents, forcing them to stay in low paying service positions.

Picture credits

The picture for this blog is a waxwork of the Terminator at Madame Tussauds, London. The picture was taken by Daniel Jurena from Prague, Czech Republic. The picture has been altered (resized and cropped), and is CC-BY-SA 2.0 licensed.

Footnote

1: The details are more complicated, but in the interest in having no spoilers, this is a reasonable description of how Skynet was created.