"...the value of human life..."
It's a poignant line. Good way to end the film. But it's also BS. T800 was only following orders. I believe if John would've given him the green light at Cyberdyne, SWAT would've been toast.
It's not a value he would've arrived at any given tactical situation on his own. His only priority is the mission.
I agree with this. As much as I love this film for being the absolute peak of old style action movie making, and for being one of the last truly old school summer blockbusters, the reality is that T2 already started that really annoying trend of trying to humanize the Terminator. That is the one thing T1 will always have over all the other movies: It wasn't afraid to show the Terminator for what it truly was. A cold, emotionless killing machine that has no free will and can only ever do one thing: to follow its programming to the last. The sequels tried to turn the Arnold Terminator into this warm, fuzzy hero character, and in doing so, the character lost some of the dark edge that made it so compelling in the first place. T2 being a Cameron film, it at least had a much finer control over this: The Terminator being able to learn human traits was only briefly glimpsed at. But even then, the Terminator was only protecting John simply because the human resistance had programmed it to do so. It's still just a machine, and therefore doesn't actually have the capability to question why exactly it must do so. The Terminator doesn't have the ability to understand why exactly protecting the boy is the morally correct thing to do.
The later sequels went completely overboard with this, culminating with the Dark Fate Terminator, which completely on its own had somehow developed a human conscious and moral code, and became this nice and soft family guy that protects its woman, when no prior programming or moral guidance (that we're aware of) existed to guide the machine to this path. Yes, I get it: We all wanted Arnold to be the hero. But they could've done it in a way that doesn't completely contradict what the character originally started out as: A mindless weapon of war with only one purpose to its being. To terminate, kill and dispose of human life.
But what do I know? Who knows, maybe the recent advancements in computer A.I. technology will prove me wrong some day.
Skynet and the Terminators and other machines all have the same Cyberdyne neural-net processor, a LEARNING COMPUTER. And John and Sarah set the T-800's neural-net processor to "learn", basically, so it would learn about humanity.
Of course, this is from the Special Edition of T2, but then, the Theatrical Edition of T2 is utter pants.
I can see what you mean, but I think the learning computer has always meant to learn to "simulate" human behavior... catch phrases, smiles, high fives, and thumbs up etc. I don't think learning computer is capable of learning actual human morality.
I think it's the same question that is posed in "Ex Machina:" We know we can teach a computer to play chess... but does that mean the computer is AWARE it's playing chess?
Does it know what human morality means? Probably. Would it grow enough to develop its own sense of human morality? I think that's still out of reach for T800.