Decades after showing the risks of combining artificial intelligence with weapons in the Terminator movies, James Cameron is now warning about it happening for real.
I do think there’s still a danger of a Terminator-style apocalypse where you put AI together with weapons systems, even up to the level of nuclear weapon systems, nuclear defense counterstrike, all that stuff.
the Oscar-winning filmmaker said in a recent interview with Rolling Stone
The theater of operations is so rapid, the decision windows are so fast, it would take a superintelligence to be able to process it. And maybe we’ll be smart and keep a human in the loop. But humans are fallible, and there have been a lot of mistakes made that have put us right on the brink of international incidents that could have led to nuclear war.
Cameron, 70, added
In 2023, the Titanic director spoke more clearly about the real-life effects of the first Terminator movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton.
I warned you guys in 1984, and you didn’t listen.
he said in a candid CTV News interview
Along with Avatar: Fire and Ash and two more parts of that popular sci-fi series, Cameron is also working on a movie version of Charles Pellegrino’s new history book Ghosts of Hiroshima, according to Deadline in June. Pellegrino helped Cameron as a tech advisor on Titanic and Avatar.
If I do my job perfectly, everybody will walk out of the theater [in horror] after the first 20 minutes. So that’s not the job. The task is to tell it in a way that’s heartfelt. The task is to tell it in a way that the book does it, which engages you, and you project yourself into that person’s reality for a moment, and you feel empathy for them.
he told Rolling Stone of adapting the account of the U.S.’ bombing of Hiroshima, Japan
Empathy, Cameron added, is what’s guiding his storytelling.
Empathy is our superpower. We have to recognize that and embrace it. At this cusp in human development where you’ve got the three existential threats: climate and our overall degradation of the natural world, nuclear weapons, and superintelligence. They’re all sort of manifesting and peaking at the same time. Maybe the superintelligence is the answer. I don’t know. I’m not predicting that, but it might be.
That’s especially true, he continued, with society
Cameron’s Avatar: Fire and Ash is in theaters Dec. 19.
Source: PEOPLE