‘Godfather of AI’ warns of human-extinction threats from artificial intelligence
He added that while he felt AI would increase productivity and wealth, the money would go to the rich “and not the people whose jobs get lost and that’s going to be very bad for society”
Professor Geoffrey Hinton, often hailed as the “godfather of AI (artificial intelligence),” comments that he is “very worried about artificial intelligence taking lots of mundane jobs”.
During an interview with BBC Newsnight, he mentioned that considering the situation, it would be necessary to implement a benefits reform that provides a fixed amount of money to each citizen.
“I was consulted by people in Downing Street and I advised them that universal basic income was a good idea,” he said.
The idea of a universal basic income imposes on the government to provide every person with a fixed amount of money regularly, regardless of their financial circumstances.
He added that while he felt artificial intelligence would increase productivity and wealth, the money would go to the rich “and not the people whose jobs get lost and that’s going to be very bad for society”. Until last year, Hinton worked at Google, but left the tech giant so he could talk more freely about the dangers from unregulated artificial intelligence.
According to reports from the BBC, Professor Hinton emphasised once again his worry regarding the emergence of threats to human existence from artificial intelligence. He highlighted recent events that have demonstrated governments’ reluctance to regulate the military utilisation of artificial intelligence. Additionally, he expressed concern that the intense competition among tech companies to develop products might lead to insufficient attention being paid to ensuring safety protocols are in place.
Professor Hinton said “my guess is in between five and 20 years from now there’s a probability of half that we’ll have to confront the problem of artificial intelligence trying to take over”.
This would result in an “extinction-level threat” for humans because we could have “created a form of intelligence that is just better than biological intelligence… That’s very worrying for us”.
artificial intelligence could “evolve”, he said, “to get the motivation to make more of itself” and could autonomously “develop a sub-goal of getting control”.
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