In the Terminator films, humanity launches an all-out assault in 2029 on Skynet’s central node deep within Cheyenne Mountain – only to realise that the artificial intelligence has no single point of failure.
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Skynet is not a monolithic system, but a distributed, self-healing network, capable of surviving total infrastructure collapse and resurrecting itself almost instantly.
This network is designed to persist through destruction, bearing an unsettling resemblance to Skynet’s structure and survivability.
At a defence technology conference in Tianjin this month, engineers from Tianjin 712 Communications & Broadcasting Co – a key supplier of military communication systems – revealed breakthroughs in elastic mesh networking for unmanned combat clusters.
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