'Oppenheimer' a warning to world on AI, says director Nolan

The story of the invention of the atomic bomb told in the new film "Oppenheimer" is a "warning" to the world as we grapple with artificial intelligence, insists the movie's director Christopher Nolan.

The British-born maker of "Memento," "Dunkirk" and the "Batman" trilogy said he believes a lot of the anguish around technology "in our imagination stems from Robert Oppenheimer," the physicist who helped invent nuclear weapons during World War II.

What he and his team at the Los Alamos Laboratory in the United States did was "the ultimate expression of science... which is such a positive thing, having the ultimate negative consequences," Nolan said.

Like back then, the startling advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are raising similar fears about the dangers of a technology with potentially uncontrollable consequences.

Some worry that AI could escape its creators and endanger humanity, much like scientists and others fretted eight decades ago with the dawn of the nuclear age.

"That was a moment in history. This is one too," Nolan's star Cillian Murphy, who plays the haunted scientist, told AFP while the pair were in Paris to promote the film, which opens across the globe this weekend.

"Artificial intelligence researchers refer to the present moment as an 'Oppenheimer moment'," said Nolan, referring to the first atomic tests, when some feared nuclear fission would lead to an uncontrolled chain reaction that would pulverise the entire planet.

Those now working on AI "look at his story for some guidance as to what is their responsibility - as to what they should be doing," Nolan said.

"But I don't think it offers any easy answers. It is a cautionary tale. It shows the dangers."

"The emergence of new...