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Decades after depicting the dangers of mixing artificial intelligence and weapons in the Terminator movies, James Cameron is sounding the alarm on it happening in real life.
“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,” Cameron, 70, added. “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.”
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In 2023, the Titanic director was more direct in referencing the real-life implications 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.
In addition to Avatar: Fire and Ash and two more installments of that hit sci-fi franchise, Cameron is taking on a big-screen adaptation of Charles Pellegrino’s new historical book Ghosts of Hiroshima, as Deadline reported in June. Pellegrino worked with 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,” he told Rolling Stone of adapting the account of the U.S.’ bombing of Hiroshima, Japan. “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.”
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Empathy, Cameron added, is what’s guiding his storytelling. “Empathy is our superpower. We have to recognize that and embrace it.”
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That’s especially true, he continued, with society “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.”
Cameron’s Avatar: Fire and Ash is in theaters Dec. 19.
