James Cameron Answers Sci-Fi Questions From Twitter

Hi, everybody, Jim Cameron here.

Welcome to Sci-Fi Support.

(upbeat music)

So we have a question here from Jack Hayes.

Sci-Fi, why you gotta be the most pessimistic genre?

Jet packs don't make up for totalitarianism.

I think there's a lot of pessimism in science fiction

about our social systems,

but it's hard to not be pessimistic these days.

You know, I think that the apocalyptic nature

of science fiction's always a comment on our times.

And I'm feeling particularly apocalyptic right now.

Let's move onto the next one.

Official BeeRay, Alright, what the (beep)

is a tractor beam and why does every Sci-Fi film have one?

Well, I actually haven't made a sci-fi film yet

that has a tractor beam in it.

But a tractor beam is mythical technology

where you can reach out with some invisible force

and grab something and pull it to you,

the tractor.

The tractor beam is obviously a technology we don't have,

but there is this little thing called flux pinning,

by the way.

When you have a type two superconductor

and a powerful magnetic field,

you get this thing called the Meissner effect

which means that you can actually lock onto it

and hold it in place and manipulate it.

That's a tractor beam in a sense that works

over a very short distance so maybe we'll be

able to figure out a tractor beam.

Tony of Earth, I like that; that's good.

Artificial intelligence is not going to end well.

Have these engineers watched any of the Terminator movies?

Yeah, actually they do.

It just doesn't dissuade them.

In sort of military think-tank circles,

they actually talk about the Skynet problem.

It doesn't dissuade them from developing this stuff

as fast as humanly possible.

At the time The Terminator was made in 1984,

the idea of killer drones in the sky

was pure science fiction.

The next big stage is going to be:

When do we give kill authority to an actual

robotic intelligence?

People are seriously arguing the ethics of that.

The point is even if we were to suddenly

grow a moral conscious here in this country

and decide that it's a bad idea to

develop an artificial general intelligence,

somebody else is gonna do it.

And then the military will justify us

developing it because if we don't do it,

the other guys will do it.

So it is gonna happen.

The people who are working at the forefront

of artificial general intelligence

say it's not if, it's when.

And they're outside prediction is 50 years,

and their inside prediction is 10 to 15 years.

As a civilization, it's gonna profoundly

alter the nature of our existence, I believe.

And we better wake the (beep) up.

I think we're doomed, personally.

Okay, this is from Mello.

Why does every sci-fi show do this whole

android-becoming-human trope?

As opposed to an android which looks human

not becoming human?

Somehow, that's not as interesting, I guess.

I think we just endlessly explore this idea

of the human-appearing machine.

And it's our way of dealing one)

with our angst about where robotics might be going.

But I think historically I think it was more about

just kind of playing with these ideas

that you can't trust people.

That's what it all boils down to

kind of at its core.

It's that we've got a hundred thousand years

of not trusting each other.

MikoKoala.

My question: How do you think the popularity

of sci-fi in the mid-twentieth century has

played a part in our twenty-first century

obsession with actually creating real robots?

That's actually a really intelligent question.

I think that a lot of the twentieth century

science fiction about robots actually has

prepared us very well for imagining a society

in which robots play a real role.

I think we're just kind of drumming our fingers

impatiently waiting for the tech to get worked out.

And I think we've all seen the advancements

in technology.

I see us now moving into essentially,

or already living in, a science fiction world.

Vojtech Kouba.

Multiple concepts from science fiction

(i.e. tablets, rockets, autonomous drones)

are now a reality.

Will we have Alien-like monsters too?

I think science fiction is very interesting

in the way that it predicted some things

highly accurately and didn't predict other things

very well at all.

Now, in terms of will we have alien-like monsters,

the alien...

And by the way, it's capitalized so I think

they're referring to the Alien.

To be very literal about the answer,

you'd have to go out into space to encounter

that type of alien, some kind of hostile alien life form

based on some completely different kind of biology.

Probably in our lifetimes, we're not gonna get

much past the orbit of Mars,

maybe out to the asteroid belt to Jupiter.

We're not progressing in terms of human space flight

very fast so in terms of us going out

and being in jeopardy from an Alien with a capital A,

I don't see that happening very soon.

I think it's interesting to point out

that we have not one tiny shred of evidence

of actual life beyond the Earth.

We all would love to see it,

but we have no evidence whatsoever.

Meghan Knox.

Why does the sci-fi/fantasy film never win the Oscar?

Exactly, Meghan!

It's what I'm saying.

Costumes, makeup, right.

It drives me nuts every year.

The first time I noticed this was when

I was just a movie fan and not a practitioner yet.

When Star Wars, which to me was the ultimate

science fiction film in its day,

so this would have been 77,

probably the Oscars of 78, lost to Annie Hall.

A little cure relationship story and Star Wars,

like what the (beep) are you people thinking?

There's this attitude that science fiction

is not humanistic enough.

That it's not about real people.

There also is science fiction that plays by the rules

of good drama and is important conceptually

and says something about our society

and has great characters and is well made and so on.

The Academy just has a blind spot about it

so they typically will reward technical awards

but not the real stuff, not the acting.

People seem to think that you can't do a humanistic

movie if you're standing in front of a green screen

which is not true at all.

All movie is artifice.

You're recording on a tape.

You've got a script that's all written down,

and you're doing take after take after take after take

and cutting it all together.

So it's innately artificial.

The truth underlies the artifice.

The truth of what you're saying is the

direct connection with the audience.

Science fiction can do that as well as

any other genre in film making.

So I think this is an oversight.

Okay, Time travel movies always seem to make no sense.

Terminator still confuses me.

How can Kyle Reese be John Connor's father

if he has to T travel?

Well, you have, what's called

classically in science fiction,

the grandfather paradox.

It basically says, If you build a time machine

and you go back to your time and you kill

your grandfather before he's met your grandmother,

you'll cease to exist and therefore you've never

built the time machine so therefore you

didn't go back and kill him so therefore you do exist.

You wind up with these endlessly recursive causal loops

in time travel.

No science fiction author has ever revolved this,

and in fact, most physicists will tell you

that time travel, certainly into the past

and altering our present, is impossible.

But that's no fun.

That's no fun.

So we're doing time travel

so just shut the (beep) up.

That's my answer to that one.

But if you want to get technical about it,

I would say that time travel works like

quantum super position.

So you have a number of hypothetical futures,

but until the whole thing plays itself out,

it hasn't collapsed down to that future

which actually persists and prevails

and goes on from there.

And all the other futures that might have been possible

even if people thought they were alive in them

simply cease to exist.

Okay, guys, thanks for geeking out with me,

and I hope you got your daily dose of science fiction.