On Friday, pioneer of AI Geoffrey Hinton told Reuters that AI might be a “more urgent” danger to humanity than climate change.
One of the “godfathers of AI,” Geoffrey Hinton, recently announced his departure from Alphabet (GOOGL.O) after ten years, citing a desire to speak out on the dangers of AI without fear of retaliation from his former company.
Hinton’s contributions are widely regarded as pivotal in creating modern AI systems. A pioneer in artificial intelligence, he co-authored the important article “Learning representations by back-propagating errors” in 1986. His innovative work in computer science earned him the Turing Award in 2018.
However, he is now one of many prominent figures in the IT industry who openly express worries about the dangers of artificial intelligence and the possibility of robots surpassing human intellect and seizing control of the world.
I don’t want to minimize the significance of climate change. I’d rather not tell them, “Don’t fret over global warming.” And that, Hinton said, is a substantial danger. However, I believe this matter may prove more pressing.
“With climate change, it’s very easy to recommend what you should do: you just stop burning carbon,” he continued. Things will work out in the end if you do that. However, it’s not obvious what you should do in this situation.
In November, OpenAI, supported by Microsoft (MSFT.O), released its AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT to the public, setting off a technical arms race. It reached 100 million monthly users in two months, making it the fastest-growing app in history.
Elon Musk, CEO of Twitter, was one of the thousands who signed an open letter in April asking for a six-month moratorium on creating systems more advanced than OpenAI’s GPT-4. Alphabet-owned DeepMind researchers Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell, among other pioneers in artificial intelligence, were among the signatories, along with Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque.
Hinton agrees with the signatories that AI has the potential to pose an existential danger to humanity, but he disagrees with their proposal to halt development in the field.
“It’s completely impossible,” he said. When asked where they were on the issue, I said, “I’m in the camp that thinks this is an existential risk, and it’s close enough that we ought to be working very hard right now, and putting a lot of resources into figuring out what we can do about it.”
In response to the Musk-backed letter, a European Union legislative committee wrote to Vice President Joe Biden, asking him to host a worldwide meeting on the future course of the technology with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
Companies like OpenAI, who employ generative AI to train their models, would be required to declare any copyrighted material used in training under new suggestions agreed to by the committee last week.
Meanwhile, Vice President Biden met with executives from several AI firms, including Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, at the White House for a “frank and constructive discussion” on the need for firms to be more forthcoming about their systems.
Hinton stated, “The tech leaders have the best understanding of it, and the politicians have to be involved.” Since “it” is everyone, “we” should all be considering it.
