Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called “godfather of artificial intelligence (AI)”, has left Google to warn that the fast-evolving technology poses a threat to humanity.
“It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it (AI) for bad things” Hinton, one of the world’s leading computer scientists, told The New York Times in a recent interview.
Hinton, who alongside two other scientists won the Turing Award in 2019, was key to the development of an important AI process called deep learning, where mathematical algorithms called “neural networks” are used to extract patterns from massive data sets.
“The techniques that we developed can be used for an enormous amount of good affecting hundreds of millions of people,” Hinton had said in a prior interview.
“The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that,” he said in his latest interview with The New York Times.
“But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.”
For what it’s worth, in a Tweet on Monday, Hinton clarified that he thinks “Goolgle has acted very responsibly”.
Hinton’s warning come after OpenAI’s launch of viral generative AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT last November blew away users with its incredible analytical, problem solving a content generation capabilities, sparking an arms race to develop and launch similar AI tech across the tech industry.
Growing Concerns About the Impact of AI
Hinton joins a growing throng of tech experts warning about the risks posed by AI technology.
19 current and former academic society leaders of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) recently published an open letter warning of the “limitations and concerns about AI advances, including the potential for AI systems to make errors, to provide biased recommendations, to threaten our privacy, to empower bad actors with new tools, and to have an impact on jobs”.
The AAAI said it seeks “to broaden and strengthen the community of engaged researchers, government agencies, private companies, and the public at large to ensure that society is able to reap the great promise of AI while managing its risks”.
“What we want is AI that enriches our lives, AI that works for people, that works for human benefit that is helping us cure cancer, that is helping us find climate solutions,” said Center for Humane Technology Tristan Harris in a recent interview on Nightly News.
“But when we’re in an arms race to deploy AI to every human being on the planet as fast as possible with as little testing as possible, that’s not an equation that’s going to end well”.
Some are concerned about how AI might impact the labor market, with some warning that AI could trigger mass job layoffs.
These predictions are showing early signs of coming into fruition.
US tech giant IBM is to pause hiring for jobs that could be done by AI and roughly 7,800 existing IBM jobs may be replaced by AI and automation.
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