James Cameron’s council is being sought out for a variety of reasons these days – mostly because real life has gotten so strange that it seems to be imitating quite a few of the acclaimed filmmaker’s movies. Cameron was in the unique position of commenting on the recent disaster with the Titan submersible, which imploded while on a dive to the ruins of the Titanic. Now, a new interview with Cameron touches on the warnings about artificial intelligence (AI) that he made the center of his Terminator films, as far back as 1984.
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Indeed, in the same year that George Orwell wrote about society being lost to totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and misinformation, James Cameron released a film (The Terminator) about an advanced AI computer system (Skynet) gaining sentience and trying to wipe out humanity to give rise to a world of machines. Terminators became an iconic symbol for mankind’s fear of machine dominance – and while the killer robots may not be something to worry about right now, the collective mind of civilization is concerned with the progression of AI.
“I absolutely share their concern,” Cameron told CTV News. “I warned you guys in 1984, and you didn’t listen.”
Cameron is in Canada to launch an exhibit about his ground-breaking deep-sea exploration, which will include a conversation with his mentor, physician, author, and diver Joe MacInnis. But as stated, the dangers of AI quickly became a focus of the interview:
“I think the weaponization of AI is the biggest danger,” Cameron continued. “I think that we will get into the equivalent of a nuclear arms race with AI, and if we don’t build it, the other guys are for sure going to build it, and so then it’ll escalate.”
For Cameron, AI is the next nuclear arms race humanity needs to worry about:
“You could imagine an AI in a combat theatre, the whole thing just being fought by the computers at a speed humans can no longer intercede, and you have no ability to deescalate,” he described. Cameron added that it is also the very human motives for creating AI (“greed,” “paranoia”) we need to be questioning right now. Those are, ironically, the same motives for starting humanity’s nuclear arms race – as explored in Christopher Nolan’s highly-anticipated film Oppenheimer, which opens in theaters this week, chronicling the complicated history of the “Father of the Atomic Bomb” and his legacy.
As for the other parallel to current events: Cameron took on the question of how AI will affect the film industry – a question that Hollywood actors and writers are all pondering as they continue to strike right now. On a hopeful note, Cameron doesn’t think AI will become advanced enough to truly replace a human being’s mind and creativity anytime soon:
“I just don’t personally believe that a disembodied mind that’s just regurgitating what other embodied minds have said — about the life that they’ve had, about love, about lying, about fear, about mortality — and just put it all together into a word salad and then regurgitate it … I don’t believe that have something that’s going to move an audience,” Cameron explained. “Let’s wait 20 years, and if an AI wins an Oscar for Best Screenplay, I think we’ve got to take them seriously.”
Avatar: The Way of Water is streaming on Disney+.
