‘Godfather of AI’ warns about digital intelligence that could be used as weapon against humanity
‘Godfather of AI’ Dr Geoffrey Hinton has revealed what we should be most ‘concerned’ about when it comes to digital intelligence.
The cognitive psychologist and computer scientist who previously worked for Google has spoken out about regretting help create the technology.
But what’s Dr Hinton’s biggest fear?
Dr Hinton quit his role at Google shortly after a group of 1,000 leading tech experts and researchers who signed an open letter calling for all AI developments to be put on pause for a minimum of six months.
Why? Well, in a bid to help stem ‘profound risks to society and humanity’.
Dr Hinton echoed the same sentiment in an interview with The New York Times, saying: “I don’t think they should scale this up more until they have understood whether they can control it.”
So, how does Dr Hinton fear the technology could end up scaling up and pose a danger to humanity?
Before he left the tech company, Dr Hinton worked to create AI which more accurately reflected the way humans’ brains work and believes if you could create an AI version using ‘specialised computer chips’ it would be ‘amazing’.
However, it would mean we’d have to ‘give up on immortality’ because ‘we’d get something far more important, which is energy efficiency’, he told The New Yorker.
He continued: “We should be concerned about digital intelligence taking over from biological intelligence.”
Why? Well, because opposed to the brain, which, if it dies, the knowledge dies along with it, if ‘a particular computer dies, those same connection strengths can be used on another computer’, Dr Hinton explained.
He added: “And, even if all the digital computers died, if you’d stored the connection strengths somewhere you could then just make another digital computer and run the same weights on that other digital computer.
“Ten thousand neural nets can learn ten thousand different things at the same time, then share what they’ve learned.”
Dr Hinton says AI could also ‘give an advantage to a nation via autonomous weapons’.
Ultimately, despite being known as the Godfather of AI, Dr Hinton think’s we’d be ‘better off without’ the technology.
He said: “It’s not worth it. Just as we might have been better off without fossil fuels. We’d have been far more primitive, but it may not have been worth the risk.
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“But it’s not going to happen. Because of the way society is. And because of the competition between different nations. If the U.N. really worked, possibly something like that could stop it. Although, even then, A.I. is just so useful. It has so much potential to do good, in fields like medicine – and, of course, to give an advantage to a nation via autonomous weapons.
“We can’t be in denial. We have to be real. We need to think, How do we make it not as awful for humanity as it might be?”