Judgement Day in Real Life? Terminator Director Fears A.I. Machines May Win

James Cameron, the writer and director behind Terminator and Terminator 2, says he is now seriously concerned that his movies’ idea of the world ending from artificial intelligence could actually come true. Cameron, best known for blockbuster films like Titanic, Avatar, and Avatar: The Way of Water, has made three out of the four top-grossing movies of all time. Before making those hits, he created Terminator—a story about an AI defense system that gains self-awareness and launches a nuclear war to wipe out the human race. In those films, humanity fights back and manages to stop Judgement Day, for a time. Cameron now questions whether we’ll be as lucky in real life.

Cameron plans to adapt Ghosts of Hiroshima—a novel about the horrors of the atomic bomb—into a movie. This new project has him thinking about the end of the world. Speaking with Rolling Stone, Cameron talked about the risks that come with mixing AI and weapon systems.

“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. According to Cameron, weapons decisions happen so quickly now that only a superintelligence could keep up. He adds, “maybe we’ll be smart and keep a human in the loop.” Still, he warns, “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”.

Though Cameron views AI as a major problem, he also thinks it might help solve some of humanity’s biggest issues.

He said, “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.” Cameron speculated that if computers ever became truly intelligent, they might actually value nature over technology. He imagined, “I could imagine an AI saying, ‘guess what’s the best technology on the planet? DNA, and nature does it better than I could do it for 1,000 years from now, and so we’re going to focus on getting nature back where it used to be.’ I could imagine, AI could write that story compellingly.”

James Cameron’s concerns echo the themes from his Terminator films, but hopefully he’ll stick to making movies rather than trying to predict the future

***