Movies - Miles Bennett Dyson

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	Movies - Miles Bennett Dyson

Dr. Miles Bennett Dyson is an integral character in the fictional Terminator universe, portrayed by Joe Morton in 1991's big-budget Terminator sequel, T2. His primary importance is as the inventor of Skynet and associated technologies, such as neural networks and advanced microprocessors. He is Director of Special Projects at Cyberdyne Systems Corporation, and therefore "the man most directly responsible" for Judgment Day.

In the film, Dyson is convinced by Sarah Connor, John Connor and a visiting T-800 to enact a direct inversion of history, ultimately perishing along with his enterprising AI research as Cyberdyne headquarters is destroyed by a polydichloric euthimal bomb. He is survived by his wife and children.

In some apocryphal Terminator novels, Miles Dyson's research is completed by his son, Daniel.

Technological Legacy

A large measure of Miles' career at Cyberdyne Systems was devoted to the analysis and reverse engineering of two mysterious artifacts -- the only part of the Terminator from the first film which wasn't crushed by the hydraulic press (its right arm), and its brain chip, rescued but severely damaged. His regard for these articles was reverential, their decipherment a personal obsession.

The design of his large model prototype is notable for its hypercube shape, an advancement and miniaturization of the "Connection Machine 2" arrangement, developed in the late 1980's by Thinking Machines corporation.

Miles' reasoning behind this design was simple: the system, in order to successfully emulate human thought, had to be massively parallel, and that required excellent communication channels between its processors. Hence, it needed many "blocks," each stuffed with processors. And while local communication within a block would be readily and inherently supported, there also needed to exist large data conduits between them to allow more limited long-range communication. "It's like neurons and axons in Legos," he once commented in an interview with Omni magazine.

The miniature blocks also served another purpose: their silicon innards were solid, printed in three dimensions. This Cyberdyne innovation sent them lightyears beyond the capacity of contemporary flat-chip processors.

Responsibility for Judgment Day

As noted above, the T-800 remarks (and history seems to record) that Dyson is the man most immediately responsible for Judgment Day's onset. However, it should be indicated that Dyson merely made it possible for Skynet, a distributed computer network developed by other people, to blossom into self-awareness; it was not Dyson, but military leaders who designed and enstated Skynet, who created and maintained an arsenal of nuclear weapons, and who gave control of those weapons, and therefore the capacity to perpetrate nuclear holocaust, to Skynet. At one point in the film, the T-800 explains that Skynet initiated Judgment Day when military command attempted to shut it down. The person or persons involved in that attempt seem more "directly" responsible for Judgment Day than Miles Dyson.

Additionally, when Sarah Connor confronts Dyson at his home with the intention of preventing Judgment Day, she tells him, "Men like you invented the hydrogen bomb!" However, Dyson can only be superficially likened to the inventors of the hydrogen bomb for his scientific and industrial pursuits; Dyson himself never participated in the creation or even promotion of actual weapons of mass human destruction, only the computer systems that made Skynet's self-awareness possible.

The seeming mistakes of the T-800's and Sarah Connor's arguments don't necessarily represent script or continuity errors, but rather errors of judgment or unclarified claims made by imperfect, fictional characters.

In the course of the film's story, Dyson, with his friends Sarah and John Connor, take responsibility for Judgment Day by risking their lives to stop it. Dyson himself ends up giving his life to that cause. Despite their efforts, Judgment Day is ultimately only postponed, owing to the reality that causal responsibility for Judgment Day lies across a diffuse range of human agents, both military and civilian, not with a single individual or specific group of people whose historical erasure would nullify it.

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