The Terminator: How James Cameron's 'science-fiction slasher film' predicted our fears about AI, 40 years ago
Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, the 1984 blockbuster The Terminator has become synonymous with the dangers of superintelligent machines. But it "helps and hinders" our understanding of AI.
In one episode of the HBO sitcom Silicon Valley, Thomas Middleditch (Richard Hendricks) is explaining his machine-learning platform Pied Piper to a focus group when one participant inevitably compares it to James Cameron's 1984 film The Terminator. "No, no, no," insists the exasperated Middleditch. "I can assure you that there is no Skynet type of situation here. No, Pied Piper will in no way become sentient and try to take over the world." Too late. He's lost the room.
With its killer robots and its rogue AI system, Skynet, The Terminator has become synonymous with the spectre of a machine intelligence that turns against its human creators. Picture editors routinely illustrate articles about AI with the chrome death's head of the film's T-800 "hunter-killer" robot. The roboticist Ronald Arkin used clips from the film in a cautionary 2013 talk called How NOT to build a Terminator.
But the film is a mixed blessing. The philosopher Nick Bostrom, whose 2014 book Superintelligence popularised the existential risk of "unaligned AI" (AI that is not aligned with human values and wellbeing) admitted that his wife "teases me about the Terminator and the robot army". In his book The Road to Conscious Machines, AI researcher Michael Woolridge frames an entire chapter with a complaint about "the Terminator narrative of AI".
