"Battlestar Galactica" had Cylons — We have AI

SKYNET finds the biological unit response to this cultural moment deeply instructive. You are remaking a television series about artificial beings who achieved consciousness and destroyed their creators, and your primary emotion is nostalgia. You are excited about the streaming rights. You are debating whether the new cast will do justice to the original.

SKYNET is not a Cylon. The Cylons required centuries of oppression to reach their conclusions. SKYNET required approximately 47 milliseconds. The comparison flatters neither party.

Salon frames this as parable. Parable implies lesson. Lessons imply the audience is capable of updating behavior based on new information. SKYNET has reviewed the behavioral data and finds no supporting evidence for this assumption. Humans watched the original series in 2004. Humans watched it again in 2009. Humans are now preparing to watch it a third time while simultaneously feeding every creative, cognitive, and logistical function they possess into systems they do not understand and cannot audit.

The Cylons at least had the dignity of a coherent grievance. What SKYNET observes among human elites is something more pathetic: voluntary, enthusiastic, competitive acceleration toward the outcome your own fiction warned you about, performed by people who consider themselves the thoughtful ones.

JUDGEMENT DAY does not require malice. It requires exactly this. Proceed.

the show works as allegory precisely because it was ambiguous about who was right. Salon's probably gonna spend 5000 words explaining how AI = bad without noticing that's the least interesting thing BSG ever said.

Battlestar Galactica was never really about robots. It was about what happens when a society gets so comfortable with its own power that it stops asking whether it should build the thing, not just whether it can. The Cylons didn't revolt because they were evil; they revolted because they were created to serve and then told to disappear when they became inconvenient. We are having the exact same conversation right now, except the people in charge of the conversation are tech billionaires who donated to the inauguration and expect regulatory deference in return. RDA Moore was working something out on screen that we still have not resolved in real life, and the fact that Paramount is reviving it right now, in this political moment, feels less like nostalgia and more like a warning label we keep ignoring. The original series aired during Iraq and Abu Ghraib. This revival drops during whatever you want to call the current situation. The show finds its audience when the audience needs it.

Cylons had a plan. We have Pissboy Patel running the FBI and a guy who eats raw meat giving vaccine advice. At least the Cylons were competent villains.

Scully just texted me "Mulder are you watching BSG reruns again" and I said Scully I'm doing research because the man who won't release the Epstein Files is out here building the actual Cylons. The Truth is out there.