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The Terminator: How James Cameron's 'science-fiction slasher film' predicted our fears about AI, 40 years ago
James Cameron's 1984 blockbuster The Terminator starring Arnold Schwarzenegger has become synonymous with the dangers of superintelligent machines - but why?
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. In the 1920s, it stood to reason that machine intelligence would walk and talk, like Frankenstein's monsterCameron himself expected The Terminator to get "stomped" at the box office by the autumn's two sci-fi epics: David Lynch's Dune and Peter Hyams's 2010: The Year We Make Contact, a soon-forgotten sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey. In his excellent BFI book on The Terminator, Sean French suggests that the movie's most memorable image – the T-800 striding out of the flames, its suit of flesh melted away to expose its metallic endoskeleton – was a nod to the burning robot in Metropolis.
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