May 1, 2023, 9:00 PM
May 1, 2023, 9:00 PM
Geoffrey Hinton spent his career researching the neural network, a mathematical and computational system that learns skills through data analysis and kickstarted the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
As Google and Microsoft face off in aggressive competition to create AI-based products like the popular ChatGPT, Hinton joins a chorus of critics warning that the technology threatens humanity.
“I console myself with the usual excuse: if I hadn’t done it, someone else would have done it”said the 75-year-old British computer scientist, known as the “godfather of artificial intelligence”, in an interview published Monday by the American newspaper The New York Times.
After resigning from his job at Google, Hinton shared his fears about the development of a technology that works better than the human brain and that no one has any guarantees as to how it will be kept under control.
“I don’t think they should expand this further until they understand if they can control it.”said Hinton, who in 2018 won the Turing Prize, known as the Nobel Prize in computing, along with two of his students.
He said he is convinced that as companies improve their AI, the systems become more and more dangerous. “Look how it was five years ago and how it is now,” he said. “Take the difference and project it forward. It’s scary.”
Google versus Microsoft
First, Hinton analyzed the impact that AI could have on the consumption of digital content. His most immediate concern is that iThe internet will be filled with fake photos, videos and texts and the average user “will no longer be able to tell what is true”.
In his opinion, Google acted “very responsibly” and as a “good steward” of AI until last year, taking care not to release products that could do harm.
However, since Microsoft expanded its Bing search engine with a chatbot, challenging Google’s core business, it has sparked a race among the tech giants that “may be impossible to stop.”
After the interview was published, Hinton clarified on his Twitter account that he had not resigned from Google in order to criticize the company. “Actually, I left so I could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this affects Google.”
“Killer Robots”
Another of Hinton’s concerns is how AI will revolutionize the labor market. Instead of complementing humans, it could replace them in innumerable trades in which routine tasks are performed.
“It takes away the heavy lifting,” but “could take away more than that,” he said.
His biggest concern is that future technologies threaten humanity and truly autonomous weapons are developed, such as “killer robots”.
AI systems “often learn unexpected behavior from the large amount of data they analyze,” he explained. “People and companies enable AI systems to not only generate their own code, but also to run that code on their own.”
“Some people bought into the idea that these things could become smarter than people,” he said. “But most thought it was too far away. I thought it was too far away. I thought it was 30-50 years away or even more. Obviously I don’t think that anymore“.
Although it is a hypothetical threat, Hinton predicted that the competition between Google, Microsoft and others will become a global race without international regulations.
He recalled that unlike nuclear weapons, there is no way to know if companies or countries are secretly working on AI.
Their greatest hope is that the world’s leading scientists collaborate on ways to control this technology.
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