Hollywood director James Cameron has once again issued a warning about AI gaining control over weapons systems, pointing to the potential for a “Terminator-style apocalypse.”
Cameron, creator of the Avatar and Terminator franchises, has spoken about the dangers of putting weapons of mass destruction in the hands of AI multiple times in the past. 1984’s The Terminator, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a cybernetic assassin sent back in time to assassinate the mother of the future savior of mankind, revolves around a post-apocalyptic future caused by a nuclear attack from a hostile artificial intelligence.
Speaking to Rolling Stone about his upcoming adaptation of the new book Ghosts of Hiroshima, Cameron pointed to The Terminator’s fictional future as potentially becoming a reality.
“Look, I mean, 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,” he said.
“Because 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.
“So I don’t know. 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 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.”
But is a Terminator-style apocalypse actually likely? A Wired article published this week revealed nuclear experts believe mixing AI and nuclear weapons is inevitable.
Elsewhere in the interview, Cameron revealed that “horrific” dreams he suffered that were informed by his knowledge of the environmental effects of the bombs described in Ghosts of Hiroshima, “became The Terminator.”
Cameron continued:
“When I was writing, imagining the story for Terminator 2, a song kept going through my head, which was Sting’s [Russians, where he sings] ‘I hope the Russians love their children, too.’ And my original title for that film was actually The Children’s Crusade. When Sarah sees the children in the playground incinerated, that was the core image for that film, and then she gets incinerated herself. So it was really about mothers, children. She was highly dehumanized at the beginning of that story. She finds her empathy, she breaks through that wall, and so I was dealing with all those themes back then. I can only hope that I’m just maybe a better, more experienced filmmaker now, and I can deal with this subject respectfully and correctly.”
Cameron, the second-highest-grossing film director of all time, will take a break from making Avatar movies to direct a film based on Charles Pellegrino’s book Ghosts of Hiroshima. Last month, Cameron said Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer was “a bit of a moral cop out,” while revealing his plans for his own movie based on Ghosts of Hiroshima.
The 70-year-old Terminator creator has called his adaptation an “uncompromising theatrical film” that focuses on the true story of a man who survived both bombs that dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II.
In an interview with Deadline, where he was asked about Ghosts of Hiroshima’s potential in the context of Oppenheimer’s $1 billion box office and seven-Oscar haul.
“Yeah… it’s interesting what he stayed away from,” Cameron replied, before suggesting Ghosts of Hiroshima may not have the kind of mainstream breakthrough appeal Oppenheimer managed. “Look, I love the filmmaking, but I did feel that it was a bit of a moral cop out.”
Cameron continued: “Because it’s not like Oppenheimer didn’t know the effects. He’s got one brief scene in the film where we see — and I don’t like to criticize another filmmaker’s film — but there’s only one brief moment where he sees some charred bodies in the audience and then the film goes on to show how it deeply moved him. But I felt that it dodged the subject. I don’t know whether the studio or Chris felt that that was a third rail that they didn’t want to touch, but I want to go straight at the third rail. I’m just stupid that way.”
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
