Scarier than fiction: James Cameron’s vision of AI future is bleaker than ‘The Terminator’

James Cameron, the director who gave us The Terminator, warns that the real-world development of artificial general intelligence (AGI) could pose greater threats than the dystopian future depicted in his iconic 1984 film.

Though he did not exactly say that an Arnold Schwarzenegger-shaped cybernetic assassin would soon come for us, Cameron said he has concerns over the direction of the development of AGI, which is the theoretical version of AI that can reason as well as humans.

Speaking at the Special Competitive Studies Project’s AI+Robotics Summit, Cameron expressed particular concern about AGI emerging from private tech corporations rather than government programs. 

“You’ll be living in a world that you didn’t agree to, didn’t vote for, that you are co-inhabiting with a super-intelligent alien species that answers to the goals and rules of a corporation,” he cautioned.

The filmmaker, who last month joined the board of Stability AI, emphasized that current surveillance capitalism could rapidly evolve into digital totalitarianism. He argued that tech giants’ access to personal data, communications, and beliefs makes them potentially dangerous “self-appointed arbiters of human good.”

Despite his involvement in the tech industry, including co-founding visual effects studio Digital Domain, Cameron remains skeptical about AGI’s development. 

“AGI will just be a mirror of us,” he said, “good to the extent that we are good, and evil to the extent that we are evil.”

Cameron expressed additional concerns about society’s increasing reliance on machines at the expense of human purpose and meaning. While maintaining a “bullish” stance on AI generally, he warns that removing humans from decision-making processes could have problematic consequences.

To quote the famous line from The Terminator: “The future’s not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.” How late is too late before such decisions doom humanity?

Watch James Cameron’s presentation in full:

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