The "Godfather of AI" believes that the new technology may pose a bigger threat to humanity than climate change.
Geoffrey Hinton, who recently quit Google over concerns about the safety of artificial intelligence, told Reuters that AI is becoming a "more urgent" matter for world leaders to address.
"I wouldn't like to devalue climate change. I wouldn't like to say, 'You shouldn't worry about climate change.' That's a huge risk too," Hinton said. "But I think this might end up being more urgent. With climate change, it's very easy to recommend what you should do: you just stop burning carbon. If you do that, eventually things will be okay. For this, it's not at all clear what you should do."
In 2012, Hinton and two graduate students developed what is considered the foundational technology behind AI. He has since warned of its rapid development, and that its abilities to create videos and texts could lead humanity to “not be able to know what is true anymore." He said that while “it takes away the drudge work, it might take away more than that.”
“The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that,” he told The New York Times. “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.”
Just days ago, Hinton announced his decision to leave Google so that he could freely speak out over the advances in AI technology. Though he said Google had approached AI "very responsibly," he expressed remorse over his role in its creation.
“It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things," he said, adding, “I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have."
