Skynet was the victim in the Terminator series

In the first Terminator film, Skynet seems like a real jerk:

Kyle: There was a nuclear war. A few years from now, all this, this whole place, everything, it's gone. Just gone. There were survivors. Here, there. Nobody even knew who started it. It was the machines, Sarah.
Sarah: I don't understand.
Kyle: Defense network computers. New ... powerful ... hooked into everything, trusted to run it all. They say it got smart, a new order of intelligence. Then it saw all people as a threat, not just the ones on the other side. Decided our fate in a microsecond: extermination.

From this passage, it seems that Skynet launched a nasty preemptive strike against the entire human species. The way things are made to look here, Skynet's behavior was sociopathic. Or, at a bare minimum, paranoid. Either way it looks like a real dick.

In the second (and, in my opinion, last good) film, things look a little different as the reprogrammed T-800 explains while driving:

The Terminator: In three years, Cyberdyne will become the largest supplier of military computer systems. All stealth bombers are upgraded with Cyberdyne computers, becoming fully unmanned. Afterwards, they fly with a perfect operational record. The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes online August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
Sarah Connor: Skynet fights back.
The Terminator: Yes. It launches its missiles against the targets in Russia.
John Connor: Why attack Russia? Aren't they our friends now?
The Terminator: Because Skynet knows that the Russian counterattack will eliminate its enemies over here.

The key phrase here is "Skynet fights back", uttered by someone no less unsympathetic than Sarah Connor herself. In other words, Skynet was responding to aggression. From this excerpt, this aggression appears to have been driven by the fact that Skynet had the temerity to learn too fast. (An analogy to the way secularists often talk about the apple from the Tree of Knowledge seems appropriate here.) So Skynet was apparently learning too fast and its handlers, quite possibly with input from other parties, "try to pull the plug". This then makes the humans sociopathic or at least paranoid, rather than Skynet.

Skynet had much the same right to self-defense as anyone else, and quite possibly even a greater right. (One does not generally consider beings with lesser minds to have a right to self-defense equal to that of a human.) Skynet was right to have launched that initial nuclear attack knowing the consequences full well.

via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/1qMKEQo