Terminator director James Cameron fears AI apocalypse: “I warned you”
Artificial intelligence has just become the subject of industrial action by actors in the Californian dream factory Hollywood. Their associations are calling for protective measures for human workers in the face of an industry that would like to rely on AI technology.
For example, representatives of the film industry are said to have offered actors a daily wage in exchange for having their faces stored as 3D scans. Machine-generated supporting actors could then be produced from these scans at any time.
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While that doesn’t seem terribly fair, it’s not this part of using the technology that Cameron is concerned about. Cameron does not share the fear that an AI could one day write the screenplays, which would make human authors superfluous.
Personally, he just doesn’t believe that “a disembodied spirit that just regurgitates what others have said — about the life they’ve had, about love, about lies, about fear, about mortality — and jumbles it all together into a jumble of words” could ever create anything “that moves an audience,” Cameron told CTV News.
“You have to be human to write something like that. I don’t know anyone who would even consider having AI write a screenplay. Let’s wait 20 years and if an AI wins an Oscar for best screenplay, we should take it seriously.”
However, what really concerns him is the military potential of the technology. To this he says:
“I think we’re going to get into a nuclear arms race with AI. One could imagine an AI in a combat zone. The whole thing is being fought by computers at a speed where humans can no longer intervene and there is no possibility of de-escalation.”
There are currently no such use cases. However, the US Department of Defense has already begun examining the creation of an archive for military data. They could serve as training material for a combat AI.
For Cameron, that’s obvious. “I warned you in 1984 and you didn’t listen,” he jokes, referring to the release of the first installment in his blockbuster Terminator franchise, in which an AI-controlled humanoid travels back in time to kill the future rebel leader and change the course of history.
