Director James Cameron worries that weaponized artificial intelligence run amok is a real threat to humanity, making his Terminator movie franchise no longer the stuff of science fiction, telling Rolling Stone:

“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. Because the theater of operations is so rapid, the decision windows are so fast, it would take a super-intelligence 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 super-intelligence,” he added. “They’re all sort of manifesting and peaking at the same time. Maybe the super-intelligence is the answer. I don’t know. I’m not predicting that, but it might be.”

Nevertheless, he says it might just be AI that is able to cut costs enough to save movies like his that rely heavily on computer-generated special effects.

“If we want to continue to see the kinds of movies that I’ve always loved and that I like to make and that I will go to see — Dune, Dune: Part Two, or one of my films or big effects-heavy, CG-heavy films — we’ve got to figure out how to cut the cost of that in half. Now that’s not about laying off half the staff and at the effects company. That’s about doubling their speed to completion on a given shot, so your cadence is faster and your throughput cycle is faster, and artists get to move on and do other cool things and then other cool things, right? That’s my sort of vision for that.”

The real danger lies not in dystopian fantasy but in our failure to see fiction as forewarning. If we ignore Cameron’s caution, we risk inviting a world not of creative envisioning, but of cold, automated annihilation — one in which “Skynet” is no longer a screenwriter’s invention, but a chain-of-command reality.

In the world of science fact, no human leader can send anyone back in time to prevent the mistakes we make by giving AI too much power today. We have to consider now the future we’re making. Don’t expect a reprogrammed robot from tomorrow to save us.

“I’ll be back?”

No, you won’t.

(Image: Pixabay)