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James Cameron has been fretting about AI since way before it was cool, with the filmmaker’s big break—1984’s The Terminator—focusing on Skynet’s potential to destroy the world. In recent years, however, Cameron has embraced some elements of the technology that has gone from a hypothetical to a thing saturating the world. Last year, Cameron joined the board of AI firm StabilityAI, saying at the time, “the intersection of generative AI and CGI image creation is the next wave.” Now, almost a year later, Cameron admits in an interview with Rolling Stone that he’s been trying to educate himself with “tools of generative AI so that I can incorporate them into my future art,” but he still worries about what could happen with a military embrace of the emerging technology.
“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 says in the same Rolling Stone interview, which centers on the book Ghosts of Hiroshima by Charles Pellegrino. The director plans to adapt the non-fiction book into a film. “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.”
Putting aside that this also sounds a lot like the plot for the latest Mission: Impossible movie, the idea of a Cuban-Missile-Crisis-but-with-AI is certainly a frightening one. “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.” (Not for nothing, the super-intellegence is a major current culprit in the degradation of the natural world.) But Cameron remains somewhat bearish on the tech, whether in his filmmaking or in geopolitics. “Nuclear energy was ballyhooed back in the 1930s as a way to feed the world. Unlimited energy. Who wouldn’t want that?” he supposes. “And then of course, the first actual real-world manifestation of it was the incineration of two cities.”
