Director James Cameron isn’t holding back as he added to his history of speculating about the future of artificial intelligence, which plays a key role in his 1984 science fiction classic “The Terminator” starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Cameron, in an interview with Rolling Stone shared Tuesday, explained that he sees a “danger of a Terminator-style apocalypse” should AI ever combine with weapons systems, including those at the nuclear level.
“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,” explained Cameron, whose “Terminator” film sees the AI defense network SkyNet become sentient and take over the world.
“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, whose “Avatar” movies also touch on the dangers of tech, added that he thinks we’re on the “cusp in human development” with three existential threats: “climate and our overall degradation of the natural world, nuclear weapons, and super-intelligence.”
