Robots capable of killing off mankind may already have taken over the world thanks to the progress made in the field of Artificial Intelligence, according to the film director James Cameron, who created first two Terminator movies.
The 68-year-old Canadian filmmaker came to his scary conclusion on the SmartLess podcast, telling the hosts that he was worried about the real life threat posed by AI and posed the contention that humans could end up fighting a war with "someone smarter than ourselves".
The Oscar-winner, who also directed the two Avatar films, Aliens, The Abyss and Titanic, said AI could even have taken over the world and it may be too late to stop it. In an article in the Daily Star, he said: "I'm not afraid but I'm pretty concerned about the potential of misuse of AI. . . I think AI can be pretty great. I think it could also literally be the end of the world."
In his Terminator films the Skynet computer network, designed originally as a defence system, turns on its human masters, leading to a futuristic war between robots and humankind. Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a killer cyborg, the film classics are seen as a cautionary tale about the potential dangers of the advances in technology.
In recent months the launch of advanced software such as ChatGPT has sparked similar fears about the unpredictable power of what Silicon Valley engineers have unleashed. Cameron told the podcast: "You talk to all the AI scientists and every time I put my hand up at one of their seminars they start laughing. The point is that no technology has ever not been weaponised.
"And do we really want to be fighting something smarter than us that isn't us? On our own world? I don't think so. AI could have taken over the world and already be manipulating it but we just don't know because it would have total control over all the media and everything. What better explanation is there for how absurd everything is right now?"
ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chatbot launched by US research lab OpenAI four months ago. Although its core function is to mimic human conversation, it can also write and debug computer programs, compose music, screenplays, fairy tales, student essays, answer quiz questions better than the average human, write poetry and song lyrics and play games.
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It has been the subject of accusations of political bias and discriminatory behaviour. In December IT "jailbreakers" bypassed its content controls to trick it into giving instructions on how to create a Molotov cocktail and nuclear bomb and argue like a neo-Nazi. Jailbreakers are described as people who gain unauthorised access to the operating systems of smartphones and computers and manipulate them into performing tasks the software was not originally designed to do.
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