James Cameron owes much of his career to explorations of the kinds of terror that putting too much faith in technology can bring about.
The film that launched Cameron’s career back in 1984 was The Terminator. Before it became the iconic blockbuster, generations-spanning franchise that it is today, The Terminator was little more than a scrappy, high-concept science-fiction slasher movie. In fact, the film had more in common with Cameron’s previous film, which he was unceremoniously fired off of, Piranha II: The Spawning, than it did with anything the auteur would go on to make afterwards.
But clearly, The Terminator’s themes of technology run rampant and resilience in the face of commodification resonated with audiences, and the film became a zeitgeist-defining sensation.
During an interview with Rolling Stone, the filmmaker discussed his adaptation of Ghosts of Hiroshima and the threats technology poses. “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 defence counterstrike, all that stuff,” he stated on the topic of AI.
“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,” Cameron continued. “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. So I don’t know. 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.”
Centering on the time-traveling antics of a weaponized artificial intelligence system known as Skynet and the group of human rebels who rise up to stop them, The Terminator feels uncomfortably prescient when looked upon through a modern lens. In the real world, audiences have seen AI’s rise in real time, as it went from something that was largely dismissed to something that was integrated into many business and government systems in the span of just a few short years.
Cameron’s complicated relationship with AI
This puts Cameron in a unique position. It was a literal nightmare of Cameron’s that inspired The Terminator’s creation, as his mind vividly saw a metallic skeleton walking through flames; a visual he would go on to bring to life in the film. But now, the filmmaker’s nightmares seem to be inching further away from fiction and closer to reality.
As such, his relationship with AI has been complicated to say the least. On the one hand, he has spoken about how the technology could be utilized for good in the film industry, helping to bring down costs on effects work and post-production. On the other hand, he has remained opposed to using it on his own work, having reportedly stated that Avatar: Fire and Ash will feature a title card clarifying that no AI was used in the film’s creation.
AI continues to evolve and expand throughout modern culture, and as a filmmaker who has been espousing the potential dangers of the technology for literal decades, it must feel surreal to be Cameron and have a front-row seat to your nightmares coming true.
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