The Terminator director James Cameron has warned that the real-world use of Artificial Intelligence could potentially lead to an apocalyptic Judgement Day scenario. With Cameron already working on a script for Terminator 7, the director has previously suggested that it is getting harder for him to write science fiction as modern technology eclipses the genre’s established tropes.
Once a vocal detractor of AI technology, Cameron previously decried the use of generative AI in Hollywood by suggesting that “I warned you guys in 1984, and you didn’t listen.” Since then, Cameron has gone on to join the Board of Directors for an AI company and has also spoken about how the technology could potentially reduce costly VFX budgets.
However, during a recent interview with Rolling Stone, the director also suggested that blending real-world artificial intelligence systems with weapons systems could lead to a “Terminator-style apocalypse.” However, he also pointed out that human fallibility has also brought the world to the brink of nuclear destruction. Check out his comments below:
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. 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. 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.
Explaining that the world is currently facing three key existential threats, which also include the climate crisis and nuclear weapons, Cameron also suggested that AI superintelligence could potentially be a solution. Check out his final comments below:
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’s somewhat conflicted views on the role of real-world artificial intelligence curiously mirror those of the Terminator franchise itself. While 1984’s The Terminator presented SkyNet and artificial intelligence as a world ending threat intent of the complete annihilation of humanity, as the series progresses, audiences were also introduced to increasingly less antagonistic versions of the technology.
From the succession of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s reprogrammed T-800s to the hybridized human/cyborgs of Terminator Salvation and Terminator: Dark Fate, the long-running franchise has repeatedly sought to balance SkyNet’s evil with the opposite view that technology could also prove itself a potential savior.
As such, Cameron’s latest comments may also provide fans with a potential glimpse of how he might approach his Terminator 7 script. With the franchise’s original Judgement Day scenario already reworked and reimagined from muitple perspectives, so too could Cameron look to invert what people know about SkyNet’s original apocalypse and ultimately make humanity’s destruction the work of human hands.
Our Take On Terminator 7’s Real-World Implications
In the six years since 2019’s Terminator: Dark Fate, AI technology has evolved at a rapid and often unnerving pace. While Cameron may have once had the benefit of being separated from an AI-driven future when he first penned the original, the highly topical nature of the technology’s place in the modern world could still work very much in his eventual favor.
Moving beyond vague hypotheticals of the 1980s, and offering a revamped take on a technological apocalypse that is very much rooted in a real world that has already begun widely adopting AI, could potentially give The Terminator franchise the edge it needs to recover from some of its less successful sequels.
Source: Rolling Stone
