Hollywood director and filmmaker James Cameron is warning “there’s danger” of a Terminator-style apocalypse if you “put AI together with weapons systems.”
While Cameron has previously expressed that how artificial intelligence may be able to help with directing movies, he is nonetheless still worried that his The Terminator franchise potentially becoming a reality if AI gets out of control.
“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,” Cameron said in an interview with Rolling Stone.
Notably, Cameron’s The Terminator is set in a world where an AI defense network becomes self-aware and begins conquering humans.
The Oscar-winning Titanic and Avatar director went on to say, “Because the theater of operations is so rapid, the decision windows are so fast, it would take a super-intelligence 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. So I don’t know,” Cameron added.
“I feel like we’re 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 super-intelligence,” he continued. “They’re all sort of manifesting and peaking at the same time.”
Cameron also surmised “Maybe the super-intelligence is the answer,” adding, “I don’t know. I’m not predicting that, but it might be.”
In 2023, the director said that he doubted AI — which he referred to as “a disembodied mind that’s just regurgitating what other embodied minds have said” — would ever come up with a story “good” enough to the point where the technology replaces human screenwriters.
“I don’t believe that’s ever going to have something that’s going to move an audience,” Cameron said. “You have to be human to write that. I don’t know anyone that’s even thinking about having AI write a screenplay.”
Alana Mastrangelo is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
