James Cameron has warned the world is on the brink of a "Terminator-style apocalypse"

He told Rolling Stone magazine: "I do think there's still a danger of a Terminator-style apocalypse where you put AI together with weapons systems, even up to the level of nuclear weapon systems, nuclear defence counterstrike, all that stuff.

"Because the theatre of operations is so rapid, the decision windows are so fast, it would take a super-intelligence to be able to process it, and maybe we'll be smart and keep a human in the loop.

"But humans are fallible, and there have been a lot of mistakes made that have put us right on the brink of international incidents that could have led to nuclear war. So I don't know."

Cameron went on to add: "I feel like we're at this cusp in human development where you've got the three existential threats: climate and our overall degradation of the natural world, nuclear weapons, and super-intelligence.

"They're all sort of manifesting and peaking at the same time ..."

Cameron recently signed an open letter calling for nuclear disarmament and his next film project is Ghosts of Hiroshima, based on the Charles Pellegrino book of the same name which tells the story of the atomic bomb blast in 1945 and its aftermath.

The director recently admitted the movie might be the most "challenging film" he's will lever make.

Speaking to Discussing Film, Cameron explained: "This might be the most challenging film I ever make.

"I don't 100 per cent have my strategy fully in place [right now] for how I want to see it, for how I want to shield people from the horror, but still be honest.

"Also, for how I can find some kind of poetry, beauty, or spiritual epiphany in it somehow, which I know must be there. It's there in every human story. So, it's going to be very challenging. I might not even be up to the task, but that never stopped me before ... "