Dependance = Demise?

**NOTE** Before you read this, this post contains spoilers for the movie "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines"

I picked up "Terminator 3: The Rise of the Machines" last night, and it got me to thinking.

Now, I seriously doubt there will ever be a computer that becomes "self-aware" and decides to wipe out the entire human race, but something along these lines CAN happen.

Toward the end of the movie, the character John Connor realizes that 'Skynet' is not a "central core" computer, but a network of computers from all over the world infected with a computer virus.

Computer viruses have been around for a long time. When they first came out, they were usually just messages that came up on your screen that said "You have been infected!", and that was about it.

Then the next generation of viruses actually did damage to files on your hard drive.

Most recently, viruses have been written to attach themselves to emails and be sent out to infect other computers which in turn send out emails to infect other computers and so on.

And, the latest viruses have been written to create what are called Denial of Service (DoS) attacks on specific computers set by the programmer or even have the ability to control these viruses from a remote location to create a DoS attack.

Now, you put on top of that the fact that people are getting faster and faster connections to the internet, and becoming more and more part of the "net generation", that only quintuplicates the issue.

How long before a virus is written that will use the computers of the world (including yours and mine) to shut down the stock market or interrupt the banking system or something that can cripple a country or it's government?

(Side note: The scary part is, the people programming these viruses - that have been caught - are usually in their teens or twenty's.)

Are we too dependant on computers in our daily lives? Will our future be controlled by hackers and/or those who control the computers and the information? Can this dependancy lead to our demise?

The answer to all these questions is yes.