I warned you ...

A “terminator” From The Future. Credit: The Terminator |
The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel

Yours truly talked about autonomous weapons for years as entities most dangerous as we don't know how AI works. Never have, never will as code must write code in order for the system to react to the real world in real time, something James Cameron capped on when creating Skynet and the terminator back in 1984 for his film,
The Terminator.

In an interview with CTV News, acclaimed director James Cameron revisited the dystopian warnings of his 1984 film Terminator—this time, not as science fiction, but as a very real concern about where military artificial intelligence is headed. And while it might sound dramatic coming from Hollywood, the parallels he draws are echoing louder in today’s geopolitical and technological climate.

Cameron’s quote—“I warned you in 1984, guys, and no one listened”—may seem like a line fit for a movie trailer, but it reflects his growing anxiety about AI technologies being weaponized. In Terminator, the AI system Skynet launches a nuclear war after becoming self-aware. At the time, this plot was pure fiction. Today, researchers and defense experts are increasingly worried that autonomous weapon systems could act with little to no human oversight.

This concern isn’t coming out of nowhere. A 2023 study by the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) warned of a global trend toward lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS). These systems, capable of identifying and engaging targets without human control, are being actively developed or deployed in at least nine countries.

Cameron argues that this regulatory gap is precisely where the danger lies. “We could be building the tools of our own destruction,” he said, urging world governments to establish firm ethical boundaries before such technologies become normalized.

Hope he's right but regulating AI won't happen because if you don't know how it works,
you can't.