Reported by The Guardian
Nobel winner warns the tech could be near to triggering major incident such as power or banking shutdown
One of the “godfathers of AI”, Geoffrey Hinton, has said it could turn out that humans would have been better off never developing the technology as he warned it could trigger a large-scale incident this year or next, such as a temporary blackout of financial or power systems.
The Nobel prize-winning computer scientist told the Guardian he is not a “doomer” about the technology that is underpinned by his groundbreaking research into artificial neural networks and believes AI has the potential to lead to a “wonderful future” but he said “it might be that we would have been better off never developing it”.
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Hinton, 78, said that within a decade and possibly sooner, humanity will know whether it can manage the technology’s risks and enable what he called “radical abundance” or whether “we fail to manage the risks and … have a huge gap between rich and poor, huge cultural problems, massive unemployment, just society being torn apart”.
Hinton was speaking before a screening of a new feature-length documentary, AI: Probably Nothing to Worry About – a title suggested by an AI chatbot – featuring him and his former Google colleague Demis Hassabis. Hinton tells the documentary makers: “I feel I have a duty. I’ve got a reputation that makes me a spokesperson and I need to burn it all on this.”
Speaking to the Guardian, Hinton took aim at the risk-taking by the leaders of some of the major AI companies who continue to release ever more powerful AI models as they race for supremacy and market-share, saying he didn’t trust Sam Altman , the chief executive of the ChatGPT maker, OpenAI, “at all”. “I think [Mark] Zuckerberg and [Elon] Musk and Sam Altman, they understand the risks, and they don’t give a shit. They’d rather have the money. That’s my belief.”
The London-born computer scientist, who grew up in Bristol and spent much of his career at the University of Toronto, said it was “extremely worrying” that Altman was in…