It's also about making deals with entities smarter than you are. Essentially the same thing can be found in Science Fiction (e.g. Culture Minds):
> Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and willfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.”
― Iain M. Banks, Look to Windward [0]
In classic Fantasy, it's dragons who take the same role, manipulating and deceiving mortals into doing bad things (e.g Tolkein's dragons, based on the old Norse traditions of dragons being sly and deceptive [1]).
And of course, the Djinn's classic Three Wishes is all about being careful what you wish for. The Djinn does exactly what the wisher wishes for, but if there's any way of manipulating it for evil, they will.
We now have AI and tech, so it's natural that we start telling these same stories about our smarter-than-us entities. I don't think the Terminator gets into this kind of story; it's more as you say about our children being a danger to us (but then the Greek creation myths are all about that, too).
> Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and willfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.” ― Iain M. Banks, Look to Windward [0]
In classic Fantasy, it's dragons who take the same role, manipulating and deceiving mortals into doing bad things (e.g Tolkein's dragons, based on the old Norse traditions of dragons being sly and deceptive [1]).
And of course, the Djinn's classic Three Wishes is all about being careful what you wish for. The Djinn does exactly what the wisher wishes for, but if there's any way of manipulating it for evil, they will.
We now have AI and tech, so it's natural that we start telling these same stories about our smarter-than-us entities. I don't think the Terminator gets into this kind of story; it's more as you say about our children being a danger to us (but then the Greek creation myths are all about that, too).
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/83257-oh-they-never-lie-the... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragons_in_Middle-earth