Hollywood Director on AI’s Threat to Humanity: “I Warned You Guys in 1984…And You Didn’t Listen”

In an interview with CTV News, Oscar-winning Canadian film director James Cameron said the weaponization of artificial intelligence is the “biggest danger.”

Cameron fears the advancement of AI poses a grave risk to humanity.

The “Titanic” and “Avatar” director commented on those leading the push to develop more sophisticated AI.

“You got to follow the money. Who’s building these things? They’re either building it to dominate marketing shares, so you’re teaching it greed, or you’re building it for defensive purposes, so you’re teaching it paranoia. I think the weaponization of AI is the biggest danger,” Cameron explained.

“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. 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 continued.

“And when you’re dealing with the potential of it escalating to nuclear warfare, de-escalation is the name of the game. And having that pause, that timeout, will they do that,” he added.

“I warned you guys in 1984, and you didn’t listen!” Cameron said.

Undoubtedly, Cameron is referring to “The Terminator.”

The 1984 movie, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, tells the story of an artificial intelligence system named Skynet that sparks a nuclear holocaust.

James Cameron Doubts AI Can Write Good Scripts, Says the ‘Weaponization of AI Is the Biggest Danger’: ‘I Warned You in 1984 and You Didn’t Listen’https://t.co/NDqwzZY4dF

— Variety (@Variety) July 19, 2023

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Variety writes:

Cameron is, of course, referring to “The Terminator,” his 1984 action classic starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. The film is set in a world where an artificially-intelligent defense network known as Skynet has become self-aware and has conquered humanity.

“Today, everyone is frightened of it, of where this is gonna go,” Schwarzenegger recently said about AI. “And in this movie, in ‘Terminator,’ we talk about the machines becoming self-aware and they take over… Now over the course of decades, it has become a reality. So it’s not any more fantasy or kind of futuristic. It is here today. And so this is the extraordinary writing of Jim Cameron.”

CTV News reports:

The use of AI and its need for regulation has also been a point of contention in the ongoing writers’ and actors’ strikes in the United States.

About 160,000 actors and other media professionals as part of the SAG-AFTRA union are on strike, joining on the picket line the more than 11,000 members of the Writers Guild of America, who have been on strike since early May.

The unions are arguing that performers need protections against their images and art being used by AI technology without their consent, and the writers say studios shouldn’t be allowed to replace them with AI to write scripts.

“If we don’t stand tall right now, we are all going to be in trouble,” SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher told reporters last week. “We are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines.”