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In a recent interview with Reuters, Geoffrey Hinton, a renowned AI pioneer often referred to as one of the “godfathers of AI”, expressed his belief that artificial intelligence could create more serious issues for humanity than climate change.
Artificial intelligence and our planet – artistic interpretation. Image credit Bing Image Creator
Geoffrey Hinton recently left Alphabet, Google’s parent company, where he had worked for about a decade, citing the motivation behind this decision as his personal wish to speak more to society about the risks of AI technology, but without it affecting his former employer.
Hinton’s work is widely regarded as crucial to the advancement of contemporary AI systems.
Geoffrey Hinton is part of a growing number of technology leaders who are expressing concern about the potential threat posed by AI if machines were to surpass human intelligence and possibly even take over the planet. Hinton also emphasized that he does not wish to downplay the risks associated with climate change, but believes that AI could be a more pressing concern.
Geoffrey Hinton. Photo credit: Eviatar Bach via Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0
“I wouldn’t like to devalue climate change. I wouldn’t like to say, ‘You shouldn’t worry about climate change.’ That’s a huge risk too. But I think this might end up being more urgent,” said the scientist.
Geoffrey Hinton also explained that in the case of fighting against the climate change, it’s relatively easy to recommend solutions we need to take in order to mitigate the adverse climatic effects – for example, reducing carbon emissions.
But in case of potential risks posed by AI technology, there is no simple recipe on how to avoid dangers.
In April, Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and Twitter, was among those who signed an open letter calling for a six-month halt in the development of systems more potent than OpenAI’s recently launched GPT-4, which now forms the basis of the popular ChatGPT platform.
There were also other prominent figures who signed this letter, including researchers from DeepMind, an Alphabet-owned company, as well as AI pioneers Emad Mostaque, Yoshua Bengio, and Stuart Russell.
While Geoffrey Hinton agrees with the concern that artificial intelligence could pose serious threats to humanity, he does not object to the idea of continuing the research in this field. He says that stopping AI research is simply impractical and even unrealistic, and we should instead focus on figuring out how to avoid risks by dedicating all the necessary resources in order to achieve this objective.
Written by Alius Noreika
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