Terminator Director Says He ‘Warned’ Us About Dangers Of AI In 1984

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James Cameron
Photo Credit: "James Cameron" by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/?ref=openverse.

Academy award winning director James Cameron believes artificial intelligence is the “biggest danger” to humanity.

The filmmaker who led the Terminator franchise thinks that world powers are currently jockeying to create a dominant AI, just like they previously were to build the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons during the Cold War.

“I think the weaponization of AI is the biggest danger,” he told Canada’s CTV News. “I think that we will get into the equivalent of a nuclear arms race with AI, and if we don’t build it, the other guys are for sure going to build it, and so then it’ll escalate.

“You could imagine an AI in a combat theatre, the whole thing just being fought by the computers at a speed humans can no longer intercede, and you have no ability to deescalate.”

With creators of AI across the globe urging world powers to put regulations in place to keep the technology in check, the guy who showed us Sarah Connor’s skin burning off her body when Skynet nuked the world on Judgement Day supposes they have a point.

“I absolutely share their concern,” Cameron remarked. “I warned you guys in 1984, and you didn’t listen.”

As Hollywood’s writers and actors walk picket lines in strike, AI usage for script writing and replacing actors is part of the dispute between talent and the studios.

Cameron isn’t worried that the rapidly evolving technology will be putting human writers out of business anytime soon.

“It’s never an issue of who wrote it, it’s a question of, is it a good story?” he told the outlet.

“I just don’t personally believe that a disembodied mind that’s just regurgitating what other embodied minds have said — about the life that they’ve had, about love, about lying, about fear, about mortality — and just put it all together into a word salad and then regurgitate it,” Cameron added, noting that he believes audiences are too sophisticated to be “moved” by stories created by artifice.

He thinks the technology is still decades off from producing anything he would be interested in reading.

“Let’s wait 20 years, and if an AI wins an Oscar for Best Screenplay, I think we’ve got to take them seriously,” Cameron quipped.

Series star Arnold Schwarzenegger, who played the Sarah Connor’s robotic assassin in the first flick and John Connor’s protector in the 1991 sequel, told Variety that “The Terminator” is not science fiction with AI’s recent advancements.

“Today, everyone is frightened of it, of where this is gonna go,” he said about the technology.

“And in this movie, in ‘Terminator,’ we talk about the machines becoming self-aware and they take over… Now over the course of decades, it has become a reality.”

“So it’s not any more fantasy or kind of futuristic,” he continued. “It is here today.”

Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan, whose film about the godfather of nuclear weapons opens this weekend, warned of the dangers of AI weaponry.

“The growth of AI in terms of weapons systems and the problems that it is going to create have been very apparent for a lot of years,” he commented to Wired.

“Few journalists bothered to write about it,” he continued. “Now that there’s a chatbot that can write an article for a local newspaper, suddenly it’s a crisis.”

Despite the inherent dangers of the “tool,” he’s still believes human’s can use it wisely.

“I feel that AI can still be a very powerful tool for us. I’m optimistic about that. I really am,” Nolan noted.

“But we have to view it as a tool. The person who wields it still has to maintain responsibility for wielding that tool.”

“If we accord AI the status of a human being, the way at some point legally we did with corporations, then yes, we’re going to have huge problems,” the filmmaker concluded.

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