James Cameron's Chilling Warning About AI: "There's Danger Of Terminator-Style Apocalypse"

Hollywood director James Cameron has warned that integrating artificial intelligence (AI) with global weapons systems could recreate the dystopian future shown in his Terminator franchise. Cameron, who is working on a script for Terminator 7, has previously suggested that it was getting harder for him to write science fiction as modern technology continues to eclipse any fictional world he might create. 

"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 defence counterstrike, all that stuff," Cameron said in an interview with Rolling Stone.

"Because the theatre 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."

Cameron warned that three major existential threats were peaking at the same time, which posed a major challenge to all of humanity.

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. They're all sort of manifesting and peaking at the same time. Maybe the super-intelligence is the answer."

Notably, Cameron's 1984 Terminator movie, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, is set in a world where humanity is ruled by an AI defence network called Skynet.

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'It gets more scary'

Cameron is not the only one to sound the alarm about AI. Geoffrey Hinton, regarded by many as the 'godfather of AI', recently stated that the technology could soon develop its own language, making it impossible for humans to track the machines.

"Now it gets more scary if they develop their own internal languages for talking to each other," said Mr Hinton.

"I wouldn't be surprised if they developed their own language for thinking, and we have no idea what they're thinking."

Mr Hinton added that AI has already demonstrated that it can think terrible thoughts, and it is not unthinkable that the machines could eventually think in ways that humans cannot track or interpret.