James Cameron warns of ‘Terminator’-style ‘apocalypse’ as AI, weapons systems converge

James Cameron created one of the best science fiction stories with the Terminator franchise about the dangers of mixing artificial intelligence with weapons. Now, the filmmaker is worried that his sci-fi creation could actually become reality.

In a new conversation with Rolling Stone, Cameron warned against the now very real issue of combining AI with weapons systems — especially nuclear weapons.

“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,” Cameron said. “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.”

The director believes “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,” Cameron added. “Maybe the superintelligence is the answer. I don’t know. I’m not predicting that, but it might be… People make a little too much about me predicting artificial intelligence being a bad thing, especially when associated with nuclear weapons. But we exist in that world right now, and whether a superintelligence can help us or whether it gets weaponized and put in charge of our missile defense because it can react much faster than we can, who knows? We could be entering that world as we speak.”

Cameron explained that he has a “love-hate relationship” with technology, and revealed that he’s currently “leaning into teaching myself the tools of generative AI so that I can incorporate them into my future art.”

“But I utterly reject the premise that AI can take the place of actors and take the place of filmmakers and all that sort of thing,” he said. “So we always have to approach any technology as being potentially dangerous and potentially helpful.”

In June, Cameron announced plans to adapt author Charles Pellegrino’s book Ghosts of Hiroshima into a movie chronicling many untold stories about America’s attack on Japan with an atomic bomb (the two have previously worked together, as the author was a tech advisor on Titanic and Avatar).

“If I do my job perfectly, everybody will walk out of the theater [in horror] after the first 20 minutes,” Cameron said. “So that’s not the job. The task is to tell it in a way that’s heartfelt. The task is to tell it in a way that the book does it, which engages you, and you project yourself into that person’s reality for a moment, and you feel empathy for them.”

The director has always been fascinated by atomic bombs and their effects, and revealed that John Hersey’s book Hiroshima actually inspired some of his Terminator films.

“A lot of the imagery that I conjured in my head from reading that book found its way into The Terminator and Terminator 2,” he said.

Cameron hopes that adapting Ghosts of Hiroshima can have a positive impact on humanity, which is the same goal he has for making all the Avatar movies (with the next installment, Avatar: Fire and Ash, due in theaters Dec. 19).

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“I’ve justified making Avatar movies to myself for the last 20 years, not based on how much money we made, but on the basis that hopefully it can do some good, it can help connect us, it can help connect us to our lost aspect of ourself that connects with nature and respects nature and all those things,” the director explained. “Do I think that movies are the answer to our human problems? No, I think they’re limited because people sometimes just want entertainment, and they don’t want to be challenged in that way. I think Avatar is a Trojan horse strategy that gets you into a piece of entertainment, but then works on your brain and your heart a little bit in a way.” 

The legendary 1984 sci-fi film The Terminator not only launched one of the most iconic franchises of all time, but it also launched Cameron’s career. The movie stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as a killer robot assassin sent from the future to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), whose unborn son will ultimately save the world from an evil AI.