Cameron talks Terminator (and abit T7) on eve of 40th anniversary

https://www.theguardian.com/film/article/2024/aug/19/james-cameron-oceanxplorers-series-national-geographic

October will mark the 40th anniversary of The Terminator, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a cybernetic assassin sent back in time from 2029 to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor, whose unborn son will one day save mankind from being destroyed by Skynet, a hostile artificial intelligence. (Cameron rejected a producer’s suggestion that he cast OJ Simpson in the Terminator role.)

“People pay the compliment, ‘Oh, it still holds up’,” he reflects. “I actually think that’s true of Terminator 2 qualitatively. I think Terminator 1 qualitatively is pretty obsolete, although story-wise it’s still pretty intriguing. There’s some interest around this idea that it was a bit prescient on certain things, like the emergence of AI, the potential existential threat of AI, which is transforming our world before our eyes.

“We’re at a point right now where it gets it gets harder and harder to write science fiction because we’re living in a science fiction world on a day to day basis. I’m working through some of the themes that I want to bring into a new Terminator film or possibly even a kind of a reboot of a larger story framework and it’s difficult right now because I want to let the smoke clear on the whole thing. That’s going to be a ride that we’re going to be watching for probably the rest of human history but certainly the next few years are going to be quite telling.”

If AI does come to pose an extinction-level threat, as some experts warn, Cameron’s Terminator films may be seen as a prophecy that humanity was heading as inexorably as the Titanic towards an iceberg of its own making. He adds: “As I jokingly said once in an interview, ‘I warned you guys in 1984 but you didn’t listen!’

“Every time I go to some gathering of AI researchers – the real cutting edge guys that are working in artificial general intelligence right now, actually trying to create a synthetic consciousness – I put up my hand to ask a question and they all crack up. It’s like, ‘Oh, it’s the Skynet guy, he’s going to be negative.’ I’m like, ‘I’m not negative, just let me ask my question, don’t judge’. And then I’m negative.”