Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of artificial intelligence”, leaves Google and warns of the dangers of the new technology

Geoffrey Hinton spent his career researching the neural network, a mathematical and computational system that learns skills through data analysis and sparked the development of artificial intelligence (AI).

As Google and Microsoft face aggressive competition to create AI-based products like the popular ChatGPT, Hinton joins a chorus of critics who warn that the technology threatens humanity.

“I comfort myself with the usual excuse: if I hadn’t done it, someone else would have”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 quitting his job at Google, Hinton shared his concerns about developing a technology that works better than the human brain and that no one has any guarantees about how it will be controlled.

“I don’t think they should expand this further until they understand if they can control it.”said Hinton, who won the 2018 Turing Prize, also known as the Nobel Prize in computer science, along with two of his students.

He said he believes that as companies improve their AI, the systems become increasingly dangerous. “Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now,” he said. “Take the difference and project it forward. It is scary.”

“Right now (AI systems) are not smarter than us, as far as I know. But I think they will be there soon,” he said in an interview with the BBC.And given the pace of progress, we expect things to get better pretty soon.. So we have to worry about that,” he added.

Google vs Microsoft

Hinton analyzed the impact AI could have on digital content consumption. That is his most immediate concern The internet will be full of fake photos, videos and texts and the average user will “be unable to tell what is true”.

In his view, until last year, Google acted “very responsibly” and as a “good steward” of AI, taking care not to release products that could cause harm.

But since Microsoft expanded its Bing search engine with a chatbot that challenged Google’s core business, a race has started between the tech giants that “might be impossible to stop”.

After the interview was published, Hinton clarified on his Twitter account that he did not resign from Google to criticize the company. “Actually, I left so I could talk about the dangers of AI without thinking about the implications for Google.”

“Killer Robots”

Another of Hinton’s concerns is how AI will revolutionize the job market. Instead of supplementing people, it could replace them in countless professions in which routine tasks are performed.

“It takes the heavy lifting out of it,” but “it can take away more than that,” he said.

His main concern is that future technologies threaten humanity and truly autonomous weapons are being developed, such as “killer robots”.

AI systems “often learn unexpected behavior from the large amount of data they analyze,” he explains. “People and companies don’t just let AI systems generate their own code, they also run that code themselves.”

“Some people believed in the idea that these things could get smarter than humans,” he said. “But most thought it was too far away. I thought it was too far. I thought it was 30-50 years away or even more. Of course I don’t think so anymore”.

Although a hypothetical threat, Hinton predicted that the competition between Google, Microsoft and others will become a global race without international regulation.

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 will work together on ways to master this technology.