There’s an entire subsect of sci-fi that’s long warned of computers gaining sentience and battling — and sometimes crushing — humanity. Dune? Frank Herbert’s books take place centuries after humanity crushed their robotic enslavers and banned any computers smarter than a person. Then there’s the Terminator films, which depict a battle between humans and Artificial Intelligence. Welp, some scientists didn’t listen, and now everyone’s anxious about how far AI could evolve. In fact, one of its stars thinks it could be too late.
“Today, everyone is frightened of [AI], of where this is gonna go,” Arnold Schwarzenegger told the crowd at a function for him in Los Angeles, as per People. “And in this movie, in Terminator, we talk about the machines becoming self-aware and they take over.”
Schwarzenegger pointed out that, at the time they were making the first one, scientists had only “scratched the surface” of AI.
“Now over the course of decades, it has become a reality,” the actor-politician said. “So it’s not any more fantasy or kind of futuristic. It is here today. And so this is the extraordinary writing of Jim Cameron.”
In some ways, we’re (alas) living in James Cameron’s world. He’s warned us of the rise of AI, which is putting many people on edge, including the striking screenwriters of the WGA. And people are so obsessed with the Titanic wreckage that they’re not heeding his advice to only do deep dives to look at it if you’re being really, really, really careful.
(Via People)
