James Cameron thinks AI "superintelligence" is one of three "existential threats": "I do think there's still a danger of a Terminator-style apocalypse"

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The Terminator director James Cameron continues to speak out against AI

James Cameron
(Image credit: Getty Images)

Terminator director James Cameron thinks that life may start to imitate art, sooner or later, and AI is one of our biggest "existential threats."

"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 in a new interview with Rolling Stone.

"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 Terminator was released back in 1984 and stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as a cyborg assassin sent back in time to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), whose unborn son will go on to save humanity from the AI superintelligence system Skynet. "I warned you guys in 1984!" Cameron previously said of the rise of AI. "And you didn’t listen."

He continued, "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."

Next up for Cameron is Avatar 3, officially titled Avatar: Fire and Ash, which will reportedly open with an anti-AI title card. Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldaña return as Jake Sully and Neytiri, and this time around their family is facing a new foe: the Ash People, an aggressive Na'vi tribe led by Varang (Oona Chaplin) and allied with Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang).

Emily Garbutt
Entertainment Writer

I’m an Entertainment Writer here at GamesRadar+, covering everything film and TV-related across the Total Film and SFX sections. I help bring you all the latest news and also the occasional feature too. I’ve previously written for publications like HuffPost and i-D after getting my NCTJ Diploma in Multimedia Journalism. 

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