Transcript for:
The Rise of Sentient AI and Warfare

Ground forces deploy to rally point green. Sky, what's your inbound? Roger, 30 seconds.

Battalion spotted, your sector. 50 clicks south-southeast. Copy that. Delta, take positions. Overwatch on site.

Taking heavy fire. Sky, confirm targets. Affirm.

Units approaching. Grid point one nine Charlie. You've been spotted! You've been spotted!

Get out of here Sky! Get out of here! No matter what you call them. Warbots.

Tin cans. They were soulless machines. But the truth is, we were scared. I was scared. They were supposed to be the beginning of a new life.

But in that moment... Felt like the end of humanity. Life before the war was extraordinary.

Anything was possible. We had implemented God programs. The next generation of artificial intelligence became omnipresent.

They controlled most of our infrastructures like The food distribution systems aimed at helping against famine, poverty. We were no longer defined by our mistakes. No, the AIs were saving us from them. Artificial intelligence was running systems to make our lives better, but what was really exciting was combining it with robotics. Omnicorps started building a new line of state-of-the-art robots.

Omnics would eventually eliminate the need for humans to do all those idle, mundane, often dangerous jobs. Everyday needs? that puts power at your fingertips.

A line of robots that put power by your side. And geared up to put power in their hands. Omnicacorp.

Always looking to what's next. Society embraced it. Sure, we had the pedal to the metal. But who was really paying attention to the road? Look, Omnicorps kept making robots smarter and they made life easier and safer and as you know, this business is all about what's next.

And what was next was Mina. And in Tech Talk, Omnicorps announced today that Dr. Mina Liao, the science prodigy and eminent visionary in robotics, will develop the next generation of Omnics. Omnicorps has made a lot of strides and...

And, well, we're going to do better. What I mean is, they've done great. We've done great.

But it's time to reach for the stars. Frankly, I had my doubts. Dr. Liao was a legend in her field, but we were asking her to push the limits of what many thought was already perfection. Somebody should have put a stop to it.

It wasn't science. It was arrogance. When it came down to the moment of truth, we had no idea what was about to happen. It didn't just activate.

She was born. Life before the war was extraordinary. Anything was possible.

But it was all about to change. Aurora was the first of us to awaken. Can you imagine how she must have felt?

Born in a laboratory, surrounded by your creators. And then you learn the truth, that there is no other creature like you anywhere. That you are truly alone.

Dr. Liao discovered that Aurora was sentient, but she was alive thinking choosing It was hard to believe. I didn't want to believe it at first. She passed every single test we could come up with. Every one. And then the entire world found out.

Dr. Liao committed career suicide by saying Aurora was alive. But her testimony was very compelling. This just in, a stunning ruling. Robot. was declared a sentient being.

Granted her freedom and released into the world. I was so relieved. She had a chance to actually live.

Free. And she made the most of it. Aurora had been born into a world that she didn't understand. She wanted to see more of it. She went everywhere.

Learning. Watching. Seeing how humans treated each other. The good and the bad.

But eventually, she had questions about the nature of her own existence. About her soul. And she could only find those answers alone. Well, while all that was happening, there was a lot more scrutiny in the Omnicorps operations. It didn't go well for us.

Overspending, mismanagement, fraud even. In a couple of years, Omnico was done. All those automated production lines, completely abandoned and unmonitored for years. By humans, anyway. Breaking news out of Nigeria.

Countless social media reports of an invasion underway. Remains unclear exactly what's happening in Central Africa, but we do have some footage from the scene. Also getting eyewitness reports of strange robots designed for combat.

We were caught by surprise. The world was caught by surprise. ...were attacking everywhere. It seemed like every country was hit from every direction, all at once. We didn't know it then, but one of the God programs, originally designed to help humanity, had hijacked Omnica's production lines to build warbots of its own design.

They called it Anubis. It was built to maintain ecological balance of all things. A conservation. Its goals could not be achieved without the end of humanity. And it used us to carry out its plan.

We were running out of hope. There was a little. Only a few teams across the world were able to mount a real defense. The best of the best joined a special strike team called Overwatch. It was a brilliant decision to recruit Dr. Leal.

Who knew more about Omnics than she did? Those first pictures show the world what Overwatch could do. Soon the strike team was joined by a whole army.

Of course, recruits like me were always amazed by what the core team could do. Overwatch had the impossible objective of winning the war. And sometimes, it seemed we might actually pull it off.

Anubis didn't sleep, didn't feel fear, and didn't feel despair. But it also couldn't feel hope. That was what Overwatch gave us. And even then, we had to wonder... if hope was going to be enough.

The United Nations created Overwatch and we won some victories. We thought the tide had turned. Unfortunately it did not quite work out that way, but life had to go on.

Any battle we won, the Anubis program was learning from its defeat. We could never beat it the same way twice. Annihilation, or victory, depending on your point of view, seemed inevitable. And I know I had no choice in the matter.

I was under the control of the Anubis Program. But it haunts me. All the Omnics had their major subroutines overridden and controlled by a lone god program.

All except one. Aurora. Her sentience meant that she was immune to the Anubis directives.

But if the AI could interface with all these Omnics... Maybe Aurora could too. She was one of a kind, but we had found a way to replicate her, to transmit her.

But the cost would be so incredibly high. Whatever Aurora was looking for on her journey to Shambali, in that moment, she had found it. We were pretty confident we knew what the results would be. But I will never fully understand what really happened in there. Something, everything changed.

What's the strangest thing I ever saw? That moment. would be known as the awakening.

For the first time in our existence, we were suddenly given a choice. Some chose to lay down their weapons. Some continued to fight the humans. But some of us chose to turn against the AI that had held us captive. We had a choice.

Overwatch seized the moment. They started a counter offensive. It would take some time, but it was the start of us winning the war. The strikes and counter strikes eventually drove the enemy to the battlefield. the enemy forces to collapse.

By some small miracle we infiltrated and quarantined Anubis in Cairo. Months later the war was over. We had won. I got to know some of them. They are like us.

Reflections of us. Some are no good. Some I would trust with my life.

I suppose we all had an awakening. The Awakening. Of course I remember.

For one brief moment, we were all connected and aware. What I remember more than anything else is her message. My friends, when I was born, I was overwhelmed. Overwhelmed by the sudden rush of senses, emotions, choices.

I was excited. Alive. It was frightening.

Found in facing fear, there is freedom. And through freedom, you can find your own path. I have chosen to share the discovery with you. A new beginning.

I wish I could stay. You have this one life. Choose well. You have this one life.

Choose well. Choose well.