One of the so-called “godfathers” of artificial intelligence, Geoffrey Hinton, urged governments to take action on Wednesday to prevent artificial intelligence from taking over society.
Following the publication of ChatGPT, which attracted the attention of the entire world, Hinton made headlines in May when he revealed that he was leaving Google after ten years of service in order to speak more openly about the dangers of AI.
The University of Toronto-based, highly esteemed AI expert was addressing a crowded audience at the Collision Tech conference in the Canadian metropolis.
Over 30,000 startup owners, investors, and employees of the tech sector attended the conference. The majority of them were interested in learning how to surf the AI wave rather than hearing a lecture on its risks or a plea for government intervention.
Hinton stated, “Before AI is smarter than us, I think the people developing it should be encouraged to put a lot of work into understanding how it might try and take control away. “Right now there are 99 very smart people trying to make AI better and one very smart person trying to figure out how to stop it taking over and maybe you want to be more balanced.”
Hinton stressed that the concerns connected to AI shouldn’t be discounted as science fiction or scare tactics. He emphasized the value of anticipating and putting plans in place for the actual hazards that AI poses.
“I think it’s important that people understand that this is not science fiction, this is not just fear-mongering,” said the respected AI pioneer. “It is a real risk that we must think about, and we need to figure out in advance how to deal with it,” he insisted.
Hinton claims that in addition to the potential of a takeover, AI also poses the risk of escalating already-existing inequality. He said that the advantages of AI and productivity increases are likely to favor the wealthy. “The wealth isn’t going to go to the people doing the work. It will go into making the rich richer and not the poorer and that’s very bad for society.”
Hinton also emphasized the issue of fake news produced by AI-driven platforms like ChatGPT. Although he acknowledged the technological difficulties in putting such a solution into practice, he mentioned the potential of labeling AI-generated content as fraudulent, similar to how central banks watermark actual money.
“It’s very important to try, for example, to mark everything that is fake as fake. Whether we can do that technically, I don’t know,” he said.
According to AFP, some conference presentations were more upbeat and focused on taking advantage of the opportunities given by AI developments, while Hinton concentrated on the dangers and difficulties associated with AI.
Venture capitalist Sarah Guo used the analogy that it would be like “talking about overpopulation on Mars” to compare worries about AI as an existential threat to those of overpopulation on Earth.
