Geoffrey Hinton: AI threat to the world may be more ‘urgent’ than climate change
Artificial intelligence may be a “more urgent” threat to humanity than climate change, artificial intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton told Reuters in an interview on Friday.
Geoffrey Hinton, widely known as one of the “Godfathers of AI,” recently announced his departure from Alphabet after a decade at the company, saying he wanted to talk about the risks of the technology without affecting his former employer.
Hinton’s work is considered essential in the development of modern artificial intelligence systems. In 1986, he wrote the important paper “Learning representations by back-propagating errors”, a milestone in the development of neural networks behind artificial intelligence technology. In 2018, he was awarded the Turing Award in recognition of his research breakthroughs.
But now he is one of a growing number of tech leaders publicly voicing concerns about the potential threat of artificial intelligence, should machines become more intelligent than humans and take over the planet.
“I wouldn’t want to devalue climate change. I wouldn’t want to say, ‘You shouldn’t worry about climate change. It’s also a huge risk,'” Hinton said. “But I think this might end up being more urgent.”
He added: “With climate change, it’s very easy to recommend what you should do: you just stop burning coal. If you do, things will eventually work out. Because of this, it’s not at all clear what you should do.”
Microsoft-backed OpenAI fired the starting pistol into the technological arms race in November when it made the AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT available to the public. It soon became the fastest growing app in history, reaching 100 million monthly users in two months.
In April, Twitter CEO Elon Musk joined thousands in signing an open letter calling for a six-month hiatus from OpenAI’s newly launched GPT-4 system.
The signatories were the CEO of Stability AI, Emad Mostaque, researchers from DeepMind, owned by Alphabet, and other artificial intelligence pioneers Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell.
While Hinton shares the signatories’ concern that artificial intelligence could prove to be an existential threat to humanity, he disagreed with halting research.
“It’s completely unrealistic,” he said. “I’m in the camp that thinks this is an existential risk, and it’s close enough that we should be working hard right now and putting a lot of resources into figuring out what we can do about it.”
In the European Union, a committee of lawmakers responded to a letter backed by Musk, urging US President Joe Biden to convene a global summit on the future direction of technology with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
Last week, the committee approved a landmark set of proposals aimed at generative artificial intelligence that would force companies like OpenAI to disclose all copyrighted material used to train their models.
Meanwhile, Biden held talks with several AI company leaders, including Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, at the White House and promised “an honest and constructive conversation” about the need for companies to be more open about their systems.
“Technology leaders understand that best, and politicians need to be on board,” Hinton said. “It affects us all, so we all have to think about it.”
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