With Terminator: Salvation hitting theaters this week, it's inevitable that all things Skynet will be on a techie's mind. H+ magazine asked the question: "Is a Terminator Scenario Possible?" of several roboticists, AI experts, and sci-fi writers and their responses were as varied as they were interesting.

John (Juyang) Weng is Professor of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University; member of the MSU Cognitive Science Program; member of the MSU Neuroscience Program; co-founder of the Embodied Intelligence Laboratory and a member of the PRIP Laboratory.

Yes, it is possible. However, this requires further advances of a new field, called autonomous mental development (AMD), which will publish its first issue of the new professional journal, IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development in May 2009. If a robot runs a task-specific program, its capabilities are very limited. It is not able to deal with any of the complex scenes in Terminator. However, robots that are capable of autonomous mental development are totally different. They are able to develop their internal mental representations and skills while interacting with the physical world, very much like the way human individual develops from infancy to adulthood. The AMD field has recently made some major breakthroughs that indicate that a human-like machine brain is possible from engineering point of view. In other words, a Terminator-like scenario is not only theoretically possible, but also practical to fabricate in a foreseeable future.