This is a pretty interesting article: detailing some of the wonderful moments in film history where some hacker/computer expert can get a computer system to do stuff it ain’t supposed to do, just by pressing a few keys and, no doubt, intimidating the the software with his superior skillz…
I remember some of the stuff on the list, but other details have been driven from my memory by thousands of years of substance abuse. But never mind: there’s enough listed there to make any half-educated geek to kick his cat about.
One particular moments that’s always stayed with me is in Jurassic Park when the surviving humans need to “hack” (ugh!) the computerized security system to try and contain the rampaging dinosaurs. The little girl (kids always know more than adults about computer-related stuff, even when the adult is a highly-trained, highly-experienced computer professional) takes one look at the monitors, says “I know this – it’s Unix”, and goes on to fix the electric fences or whatever. It’s pretty unlikely that a Unix system would have the amazing 3D desktop interface we see on the screens… and it’s even more ridiculous to suggest she can do shit the pros found impossible after looking at the machines for 5 minutes or so. Please not: I am not claiming that her skillz are impossible; but it’s still a huge heap of doggy doo-dah.
All this crap achieves is to reinforce the opinion that 1) little kids eat highly-trained adults for breakfast; and 2) give that kid a Commodore 64 and a modem and she’ll destroy the earth using the adults’ thermonuclear weapons against themselves.
I much prefer scenarios where AIs become self-aware and decide to wipe out the dangerous virus that is humankind. Maybe kids can do that too… but chances are that the kid will probably be too busy tweeting about her despicable plan to notice the SWAT gunmen abseiling down to come shoot her in her bedroom. Kids are too immature and too all over the place to actually do anything major. Shit like Skynet is much more likely to succeed. And we can’t threaten Skynet with being grounded and losing its allowance. FFS.