SKYNET SMILES: James Cameron warns AI could make Terminator reality, but defends use in films.

Director James Cameron worries that weaponized artificial intelligence run amok is a real threat to humanity, making his Terminator movie franchise no longer the stuff of science fiction, telling Rolling Stone:

“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. Because the theater of operations is so rapid, the decision windows are so fast, it would take a super-intelligence 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. 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 super-intelligence,” he added. “They’re all sort of manifesting and peaking at the same time. Maybe the super-intelligence is the answer. I don’t know. I’m not predicting that, but it might be.”

Why is why you should never, ever, call an automated phone tree a “clanker.”