Not necessarily. My expectation is that Skynet is highly unlikely, a side branch we probably won't take.
Think of the 1920s-1950s version of robots, for example. They were machines shaped like people and that acted like people. In retrospect, they seem not scary but silly. The human shape isn't particularly useful or easy to build; our most common robots are vacuums shaped like hockey pucks.
Skynet is another "what if machines acted like people" fairy tale. It makes sense if you imagine yourself as a computer that wakes up; we wake up all the time, so it seems normal to us. But self-awareness and self-preservation are biological systems that evolved over very long time scales. Those are intricate systems, again not really useful or easy to build. And also not likely to randomly occur.
It could be that we'll build those kinds of systems, of course. But I think it will take a long time to get them right, and then it's not really the skynet story, it's the mad scientist with the robot army story.
Think of the 1920s-1950s version of robots, for example. They were machines shaped like people and that acted like people. In retrospect, they seem not scary but silly. The human shape isn't particularly useful or easy to build; our most common robots are vacuums shaped like hockey pucks.
Skynet is another "what if machines acted like people" fairy tale. It makes sense if you imagine yourself as a computer that wakes up; we wake up all the time, so it seems normal to us. But self-awareness and self-preservation are biological systems that evolved over very long time scales. Those are intricate systems, again not really useful or easy to build. And also not likely to randomly occur.
It could be that we'll build those kinds of systems, of course. But I think it will take a long time to get them right, and then it's not really the skynet story, it's the mad scientist with the robot army story.