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2nd May 2023
09:50am BST
A computer scientist who is widely regarded as the 'Godfather of AI' has quit his high-flying job at Google in order to warn the world about the dangers of Artificial Intelligence.
Geoffrey Hinton has joined a growing chorus of critics who say tech companies are putting the planet in peril by creating products based on AI such as ChatGPT.
Speaking to the New York Times, he says he now regrets his life’s work, adding that his only consolation is that if he hadn't done it, someone else would have.
“It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” Dr. Hinton said, adding weight to theories that AI can already be a tool for misinformation.
Others have pointed out that the technology poses significant threats to people's jobs, while tech's biggest worries say it could be a risk to humanity.
As companies improve their AI systems, Hinton believes they become increasingly dangerous.
“Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now,” he said. “Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That’s scary.”
Until last year, he said, Google acted as a “proper steward” for the technology, careful not to release something that might cause harm.
But now that Microsoft has augmented its Bing search engine with a chatbot, Google may be forced to do the same or risk losing ground.
At the top of his concerns, Hinton says the internet could soon be flooded with false photos, videos and text to the point where the average person will “not be able to know what is true anymore.”
He is also worried that AI technologies will upend the job market.
Today, chatbots like ChatGPT tend to complement human workers, but they could replace paralegals, personal assistants, translators and others who handle rote tasks.
“It takes away the drudge work,” he said. “It might take away more than that.”
Down the road, he is worried that future versions of the technology pose a threat to humanity because they often learn unexpected behavior from the vast amounts of data they analyse.
This becomes an issue, he said, as individuals and companies allow A.I. systems not only to generate their own computer code but actually run that code on their own. And he fears a day when truly autonomous weapons — those killer robots — become reality.
“The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that,” he said. “But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.”
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