Director James Cameron believes that the rise of artificial intelligence could lead to an apocalyptic event mirroring the plot of one of his most famous films.
“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,” Cameron said in an interview with Rolling Stone.
The Terminator is Cameron’s classic 1984 action flick about a cyborg assassin (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) who travels back in time from a future in which a self-conscious AI has triggered a nuclear apocalypse.
Cameron explained why he thinks that the movie, whose future is set in 2029, isn’t so far off from being a real-life possibility.
“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,” he said.
“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.”
The director behind blockbusters like Avatar and Titanic was speaking to Rolling Stone to promote the publication of Ghosts of Hiroshima, a nonfiction book about the first-ever use of a nuclear weapon by writer Charles Pellegrino. Cameron intends to adapt the work into a feature film.
The atomic bomb, nicknamed Little Boy, was dropped by the Enola Gay, an American B-29 bomber, onto Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 6, 1945. Three days later, another bomb, dubbed Fat Man, was dropped onto the city of Nagasaki. In total, approximately 200,000 people were killed in the attacks.
While AI has rapidly become a part of daily life for many people over the past few years, experts have warned that its long-term risks are cataclysmic.
Thirty-six percent of AI scientists surveyed by Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered AI in 2023 said that they believed it could cause a “nuclear-level catastrophe.”
At a summit of nuclear war researchers at the University of Chicago last month, the experts were in agreement that it was inevitable that AI would become integrated with nuclear weapons systems, although they differed on the exact dangers it would pose, according to Wired.
