Geoffrey Hinton, known as the “godfather of AI,” fears the technology he helped build
could wipe out humanity — and the tech industry is taking the wrong approach to
stop it.
Hinton, a Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist and a former Google executive,
has warned in the past that there is a 10% to 20% chance that AI wipes out humans.
On Tuesday, he expressed doubts about how tech companies are trying to ensure
humans remain “dominant” over “submissive” AI systems.
“That’s not going to work. They’re going to be much smarter than us. They’re going to
have all sorts of ways to get around that,” Hinton said at Ai4, an industry conference
in Las Vegas.
This year has already seen examples of AI systems willing to deceive, cheat and steal
to achieve their goals. For example, to avoid being replaced, one AI model tried to
blackmail an engineer about an affair it learned about in an email.
Instead of forcing AI to submit to humans, Hinton presented an intriguing solution:
building “maternal instincts” into AI models, so “they really care about people” even
once the technology becomes more powerful and smarter than humans.
Hinton said it’s not clear to him exactly how that can be done technically but stressed
it’s critical researchers work on it.
Hinton is known for his pioneering work on neural networks, which helped pave the
way to today’s AI boom.
In 2023, he stepped down from Google and started speaking out about the dangers of AI.
Not everyone is on board with Hinton’s maternal AI approach.
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