Geoffrey Hinton, often called the "godfather of AI," is a British-Canadian computer scientist whose pioneering work in neural networks and deep learning has been foundational to modern artificial intelligence.

In 2012, Hinton and his students at the University of Toronto developed a neural network technology that dramatically advanced AI capabilities, leading to its acquisition by Google for $44 million .

Hinton’s research on backpropagation algorithms enabled the training of deep neural networks, which are now essential for applications like image and speech recognition .

He is one of the most cited researchers in computer science and cognitive psychology, and in 2018, he received the Turing Award, often considered the Nobel Prize of computing .

In 2023, Hinton resigned from Google to speak more freely about his growing concerns regarding AI’s potential dangers .

He warned that while current AI systems are not yet more intelligent than humans, they could soon surpass human intelligence, raising the risk that AI might become uncontrollable and develop goals that conflict with human interests .

Hinton expressed particular worry about AI being misused by malicious actors and the difficulty of preventing such misuse, stating, "It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things" .

He also highlighted the risk of AI systems modifying their own code, potentially leading to scenarios where they operate beyond human control .

Hinton has even said that AI poses a more urgent threat to humanity than climate change .

Hinton’s warnings made headlines because of his stature in the field and the gravity of his concerns.

His resignation sparked widespread debate, with over 1,000 tech leaders, including Elon Musk, signing a letter calling for a pause in AI development until safety protocols are established .

Other experts, such as Sam Altman of OpenAI, echoed Hinton’s concerns and advocated for legislative regulation of AI .

Geoffrey Hinton, often called the "godfather of AI," is a British-Canadian computer scientist whose pioneering work in neural networks and deep learning has been foundational to modern artificial intelligence.

In 2012, Hinton and his students at the University of Toronto developed a neural network technology that dramatically advanced AI capabilities, leading to its acquisition by Google for $44 million .

Title:

Content: More Than Half of Americans Think AI Poses a Threat to Humanity

AI is the talk of the town these days. But despite the technology’s impressive accomplishments—or perhaps because of them—not all of that talk is positive. There was a New York Times tech columnist’s piece about his unsettling interaction with ChatGPT in February; an open letter calling for a moratorium on AI research in March; “godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton’s dramatic resignation from Google and warning about the dangers of AI; and just this week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s testimony before Congress, in which he said his “worst fear is we cause significant harm to the world” and encouraged legislation around the technology (though he also argued that generative AI should be treated differently, which would be convenient for his company).

It seems these warnings (along with all the other media circulating on the topic) have reached the American public loud and clear, and people don’t quite know what to think—but many are getting nervous. A poll carried out last week by Reuters revealed that more than half of Americans believe AI poses a threat to humanity’s future.

The poll was conducted online between May 9 and May 15, with 4,415 adults participating, and the results were published yesterday. More than two-thirds of respondents expressed concern about possible negative impacts of AI, while 61 percent believe it could be a threat to civilization.

“It’s telling such a broad swatch of Americans worry about the negative effects of AI,” said Landon Klein, director of US policy at the Future of Life Institute, the organization behind the previously mentioned open letter. “We view the current moment similar to the beginning of the nuclear era, and we have the benefit of public perception that is consistent with the need to take action.”

One nebulous aspect of the poll, and of many of the headlines about AI we see on a daily basis, is how the technology is defined. What are we referring to when we say “AI”? The term encompasses everything from recommendation algorithms that serve up content on YouTube and Netflix, to large language models like ChatGPT, to models that can design incredibly complex protein architectures, to the Siri assistant built into many iPhones.

IBM’s definition is simple: “a field which combines computer science and robust datasets to enable problem-solving.” Google, meanwhile, defines it as “a set of technologies that enable computers to perform a variety of advanced functions, including the ability to see, understand and translate spoken and written language, analyze data, make recommendations, and more.”

It could be that peoples’ fear and distrust of AI comes partly from a lack of understanding of it, and a stronger focus on unsettling examples than positive ones. The AI that can design complex proteins may help scientists discover stronger vaccines and other drugs, and could do so on a vastly accelerated timeline.

In fact, biotechnology and medicine are two fields for which AI holds enormous promise, be it by modeling millions of proteins, coming up with artificial enzymes, powering brain implants that help disabled people communicate, or helping diagnose conditions like Alzheimer’s.

Sebastian Thrun, a computer science professor at Stanford who founded Google X, pointed out that there’s not enough public awareness of the potential for positive impact AI has. “The concerns are very legitimate, but I think what’s missing in the dialogue in general is why are we doing this in the first place?” he said. “AI will raise peoples’ quality of life, and help people be more competent and more efficient.”

While 61 percent of the poll’s respondents said AI could be a risk to humanity, only 22 percent said it won’t be a risk; the other 17 percent weren’t sure.

However, the (sort of?) good news is that AI isn’t the biggest thing Americans are losing sleep over. The top worry at the moment is, unsurprisingly, the economy (82 percent of respondents fear a looming recession), with crime coming in second (77 percent said they support increasing police funding to fight crime).

If an AI solution came along that could, say, point out economic strategies humans haven’t yet thought of, would that make people less wary of it?

Given everything else the tech can do, this doesn’t seem like such a long shot.

Image Credit: Google DeepMind / Unsplash

Vanessa Bates Ramirez
Vanessa is senior editor of Singularity Hub. She's interested in biotechnology and genetic engineering, the nitty-gritty of the renewable energy transition, the roles technology and science play in geopolitics and international development, and countless other topics.
RELATED
latest
Don't miss a trend
Get Hub delivered to your inbox

featured

Hinton’s research on backpropagation algorithms enabled the training of deep neural networks, which are now essential for applications like image and speech recognition .

Title:

Content: Mark Woods: Is orange the color of progress on Jacksonville riverfront? Let's hope so.
GUEST

Retired engineering dean: Urgent steps needed to mitigate catastrophic potential of AI

Dr. Suresh Chandra
Guest columnist

In historical terms, not many topics have attracted as much attention as artificial intelligence has in the past year. Catastrophic predictions by experts in this revolutionary field have propelled them to urge governments and technology corporations to urgently put in place regulations and guidelines to ensure that pernicious effects of AI are avoided.

Geoffrey Hinton, “the godfather of AI,” recently made headlines as he left Google after a long association so he could sound the alarm about AI’s ability to outsmart humans and spawn devastating problems for mankind’s existence. Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, appeared before the U. S. Congress in May and articulated the same concern. He has recently embarked on a whirlwind tour of Asian and European countries to share his anxiety regarding AI and recommend urgent action in his meetings with political and technical leaders there.

Altman is one of the dozens of top experts and industry leaders to warn about the existential threat to humanity presented by AI in the next five to 10 years. They strongly feel that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

JU law dean:The classic conundrum presented by ChatGPT, especially in academia

More:AI firm to map Jacksonville inch-by-inch. How might its findings affect homeowners' bills?

Letters:Why won’t Gov. DeSantis talk about his Navy service at Guantanamo prison?

This also reflects the view of a large number of participants in the Yale CEO Summit in June.

In May top U.S. and European officials met in Sweden to discuss oversight of AI and pledged to help establish voluntary codes of conduct. The European Union plans to place new requirements on high-risk AI in socioeconomic processes, the government use of AI and the regulated consumer products with AI systems.

Unfortunately the U. S. Congress, despite dire warnings, has been reluctant to come up with needed legislation for fear of alienating key corporations. Not surprisingly, some prominent U.S. corporations have expressed reservations about the drastic steps that the European Union has decided to implement.

The rise of AI has led many economists to issue stern warnings regarding our labor market. As many as 300 million jobs around the world could eventually be automated, according to Goldman Sachs. Some 14 million positions could disappear in the next five years alone. Even the jobs that survive will quite possibly not look much like the jobs of today.

Other potentially harmful outcomes include social surveillance (gathering data on citizens’ activities, relationships and political views), widening socioeconomic inequality, autonomous weapons powered by AI, financial crises brought about by AI algorithms and ransom/extortion threats through manipulation of voice and photos.

The beneficial impact of AI technology in the past decade is manifest in smartphone photos; facial recognition software; numerous medical applications, such as analyzing MRI scans, spotting lung cancer or managing mental health issues; understanding by farmers of crop yields; popular apps like Google Maps; use of speech recognition to translate words from one language to another; advances in social networks (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri and Google Assistant); and creating musical compositions or paintings.

Inevitably, AI technology is expected to bring more opportunities in jobs and industries that weren’t previously possible. Thus, one of the most promising aspects of AI is expected to be our entry into a golden age of human possibility, technological development and economic growth.

The above-stated amazing AI-related progress notwithstanding, the potential for destruction of the societal structure is a grave threat and must be avoided. It is imperative that the world develop national and international regulations for AI without delay. The creation of organizational standards for applying AI, making it part of company culture and discussions — as well as infusing humanities perspectives in technology development — are part of this all-important process.

Suresh Chandra, Ph.D., is professor emeritus and former dean of the College of Engineering at North Carolina A&T State University. He lives in Ponte Vedra.

This guest column is the opinion of the author and does not necessarily represent the views of the Times-Union. We welcome a diversity of opinions.

Title:

Content: The ‘Godfather of AI’ warns about potential dangers of the technology as he quits Google

British-Canadian computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton admits he has fears for the future of AI

In a Frankenstein-esque tale of maker and master, Geoffrey Hinton, 75, dubbed ‘the godfather of AI’, has left Google with a parting warning over the dangers of artificial intelligence.

In 2012, the British-Canadian computer scientist invented technology with two students at University of Toronto that would become the intellectual foundation for AI systems. Google purchased the rights to this neural network tech to the tune of $44 million, which also propelled Dr Hinton to receive the Turing Award in 2018, considered the Nobel Prize of computing.

Read More
The ultimate part-AI girl? One Tatler correspondent entrusts ChatGPT with her next assignment

ChatGPT’s the new It Girl in Town and now she’s got all the gossip, writes Dora Davies-Evitt in the April issue

Yet now, Dr Hinton has packed in the day job at Google to join a chorus of anxious experts demanding a rollback of AI research until more robust safety measures are designed and deployed. Dr Hinton told the BBC: ‘Right now, they’re not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell. But I think they soon may be.’

While many look upon AI as a natural technological development akin to the internet that could lead to exciting breakthroughs for humanity, there are growing fears that AI is a Pandora’s box. Reflecting on the effects of his work, Dr Hinton said: ‘I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody would have,’ as he admitted, ‘it is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things.’

Read More
Cyber Society: Meet the NFT duo dominating the metaverse

Old Etonian digital artists Dominic Smith and Joe Carnell have caught the attention of Brooklyn Beckham, Steve Aoki and Jaden Smith

The scientist went on to warn that AI could be taught to ‘create sub-goals like “I need to get more power”’, and be harnessed by nefarious actors to wreak havoc. With innovation driven forward by the unstoppable competition between behemoths like Google and Microsoft, Dr Hinton warned innovation will only increase exponentially in the coming years.

There are those who are trying to apply the brakes to this runaway train. In March, an open letter was signed by over 1,000 tech leaders and researchers, including Elon Musk and fellow Turing Award winner Yoshu Bengio, calling for a six-month moratorium on AI development. A few days later, 19 leaders of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence released their own letter on the risks of AI. The signatures included that of Eric Horvitz, chief scientific officer at Microsoft.

The main outcry over AI lies in its ability to create and disseminate false news and images, which the public may find increasingly hard to identify. AI also poses a threat to academia and careers (see: Tatler’s foray into the world of ChatGPT). Dr Hinton believes that AI will fundamentally disrupt the workplace and take over the ‘drudge work’.

Read More
Lady Meta: my stratospheric rise through the metaverse

The Crypto Fashion Week debutante on becoming VR’s favourite It Girl

However Google’s chief scientist, Jeff Dean, offered words of comfort, adding: 'We remain committed to a responsible approach to AI. We’re continually learning to understand emerging risks while also innovating boldly.’

Which 1986 paper by Hinton became foundational for modern neural networks?

Which 1986 paper by Hinton became foundational for modern neural networks?

He is one of the most cited researchers in computer science and cognitive psychology, and in 2018, he received the Turing Award, often considered the Nobel Prize of computing .

Title:

Content: World's first protection against AI is approved by all 193 UN nations that will ban malicious designs and development of the tech - and Russia and China co-sponsored the new resolution

  • The UN is setting new guardrails against AI to protect data and human rights
  • The resolution was signed by all 193 UN members and 123 non-UN countries
  • Tech titans have expressed growing concerns about the development of AI
  • The 'Godfather of AI' has said he regrets developing the technology
  • READ MORE: AI poses 'extinction-level' threat and government must control it

Artificial intelligence has stoked fears and security concerns for years but a new global resolution to safeguard the public may provide much-needed reassurance.

The United Nations General Assembly approved a resolution to shield personal data, monitor AI for potential risks including scams, and protect human rights.

The resolution - proposed by the US - is non-binding but was agreed upon by all 193 UN member nations and co-sponsored by non-members from 123 countries, including China and Russia.

The resolution comes as high-profile tech moguls have expressed concerns about AI's reliability, including Geoffrey Hinton - the 'Godfather of AI' - who said last year that he regretted creating the technology and worries that machines could take over.

All 193 UN members signed an AI resolution to protect people's data and human rights

The White House called the resolution a 'historic step' and Vice President Kamala Harris said she and President Joe Biden are committed to establishing AI safeguards

The White House praised the resolution, calling it a 'historic step' to ensuring 'trustworthy' advancements in AI.

National security adviser Jake Sullivan wrote in a statement: 'The resolution adopted today lays out a comprehensive vision for how countries should respond to the opportunities and challenges of AI.

'It lays out a path for international cooperation on AI, including to promote equitable access, take steps to manage the risks of AI, protect privacy, guarding against misuse, prevent exacerbated bias and discrimination.'

It took three months for the countries to finalize negotiations and agree on global privacy policies to ensure the AI technology benefits all nations and is 'safe, secure and trustworthy.'

The resolution noted the nations needed to agree on AI's 'design, development, deployment and use of artificial intelligence systems' is accelerating.

'We're sailing in choppy waters with the fast-changing technology, which means that it's more important than ever to steer by the light of our values,' a senior UN administration official said, and added that this resolution is the 'first-ever truly global consensus document on AI.'

This resolution aims to close the gaps in the technological divide between Western countries and poorer, third-world countries to make sure their technology is advanced enough to benefit from AI.

'The improper or malicious design, development, deployment and use of artificial intelligence systems ... pose risks that could ... undercut the protection, promotion and enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms,' the resolution stated.

Scammers have used AI to steal people's data and money and have been used to impersonate family members on the phone - leading their relatives to believe they're in trouble and need money immediately before scamming them out of thousands of dollars.

AI has been used to make deepfake videos and pictures of people without their knowledge or consent

AI has also been used to create deepfake photos and videos of celebrities and average people, and because much of the violations are done through complex algorithms, it can be difficult to hold actors accountable for any harm caused.

'Now is the time to not only ensure that AI systems are rights respecting by design, but also to guarantee that those who are impacted by these technologies are not only meaningfully involved in decision-making on how AI technology should be regulated, but also that their experiences are continually surfaced and are centered within these discussions,' Amnesty International reported.

READ MORE: AI-generated voice calls are made ILLEGAL in US - and FCC says ruling 'takes effect immediately'

Following the new ruling, FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said, 'We're putting the fraudsters behind these robocalls on notice.'

Advertisement

The agreement between all UN members and the support from other countries was a major development.

UN members said that there were 'lots of heated conversations. ... But we actively engaged with China, Russia, Cuba, other countries that often don't see eye to eye with us on issues.'

According to the resolution, all participating countries will ensure it is adopted and developed in a secure way that prevents the systems from exposing people's data and will make sure all nations can enjoy the benefits.

Vice President Kamala Harris, the US's AI Czar, said in a statement that the White House welcomes the UN's adoption of the resolution.

She continued: 'President Biden and I are committed to establishing and strengthening international rules and norms on emerging technology – because technology with global impact, such as AI, requires global action, and when it comes to the challenges of the 21st century, we believe all nations must be guided by a common set of understandings.'

The resolution comes after AI faced scrutiny from top tech executives who have painted a 'world-on-fire' scenario, with many warning that AI machines could take over, leading to an 'extinction level' event.

Tech titans penned a letter in March 2023 urging lawmakers to force companies to pause their AI software developments.

'Recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control,' said the letter which was signed by more than 1,000 tech developers and experts.

Among those who signed the letter were X owner Elon Musk and OpenAI ChatGPT founder Sam Altman.

Hinton also foretold what steps the technology could take to get out of control and cause human extinction.

'One of the ways these systems might escape control is by writing their own computer code to modify themselves. And that's something we need to seriously worry about,' Hinton told CNBC last year.

The AI godfather has even gone so far as to say he regrets building the technology but told The New York Times: 'I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn't done it, somebody else would have.'

Which prestigious award did Hinton receive in 2018 for his work on neural networks?

Which prestigious award did Hinton receive in 2018 for his work on neural networks?

In 2023, Hinton resigned from Google to speak more freely about his growing concerns regarding AI’s potential dangers .

Why did Hinton leave Google when he helped develop AI but later grew concerned about its dangers?

Why did Hinton leave Google when he helped develop AI but later grew concerned about its dangers?

He warned that while current AI systems are not yet more intelligent than humans, they could soon surpass human intelligence, raising the risk that AI might become uncontrollable and develop goals that conflict with human interests .

Title:

Content: Skip to main contentSkip to navigation

UK and US intervene amid AI industry’s rapid advances

Competition and Markets Authority sends ‘pre-warning’ to sector, while White House announces measures to address risks

The UK and US have intervened in the race to develop ever more powerful artificial intelligence technology, as the British competition watchdog launched a review of the sector and the White House advised tech firms of their fundamental responsibility to develop safe products.

Regulators are under mounting pressure to intervene, as the emergence of AI-powered language generators such as ChatGPT raises concerns about the potential spread of misinformation, a rise in fraud and the impact on the jobs market, with Elon Musk among nearly 30,000 signatories to a letter published last month urging a pause in significant projects.

The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said on Thursday it would look at the underlying systems – or foundation models – behind AI tools. The initial review, described by one legal expert as a “pre-warning” to the sector, will publish its findings in September.

On the same day, the US government announced measures to address the risks in AI development, as Kamala Harris, the vice-president, met chief executives at the forefront of the industry’s rapid advances. In a statement, the White House said firms developing the technology had a “fundamental responsibility to make sure their products are safe before they are deployed or made public”.

The meeting capped a week during which a succession of scientists and business leaders issued warnings about the speed at which the technology could disrupt established industries. On Monday, Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of AI”, quit Google in order to speak more freely about the technology’s dangers, while the UK government’s outgoing scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, urged ministers to “get ahead” of the profound social and economic changes that could be triggered by AI, saying the impact on jobs could be as big as that of the Industrial Revolution.

Sarah Cardell said AI had the potential to “transform” the way businesses competed, but that consumers must be protected.

The CMA chief executive said: “AI has burst into the public consciousness over the past few months but has been on our radar for some time. It’s crucial that the potential benefits of this transformative technology are readily accessible to UK businesses and consumers while people remain protected from issues like false or misleading information.”

ChatGPT and Google’s rival Bard service are prone to delivering false information in response to users’ prompts, while concerns have been raised about AI-generated voice scams. The anti-misinformation outfit NewsGuard said this week that chatbots pretending to be journalists were running almost 50 AI-generated “content farms”. Last month, a song featuring fake AI-generated vocals purporting to be Drake and the Weeknd was pulled from streaming services.

The CMA review will look at how the markets for foundation models could evolve, what opportunities and risks there are for consumers and competition, and formulate “guiding principles” to support competition and protect consumers.

The leading players in AI are Microsoft, ChatGPT developer OpenAI – in which Microsoft is an investor – and Google parent Alphabet, which owns a world-leading AI business in UK-based DeepMind, while leading AI startups include Anthropic and Stability AI, the British company behind Stable Diffusion.

Alex Haffner, competition partner at the UK law firm Fladgate, said: “Given the direction of regulatory travel at the moment and the fact the CMA is deciding to dedicate resource to this area, its announcement must be seen as some form of pre-warning about aggressive development of AI programmes without due scrutiny being applied.”

In the US, Harris met the chief executives of OpenAI, Alphabet and Microsoft at the White House, and outlined measures to address the risks of unchecked AI development. In a statement following the meeting, Harris said she told the executives that “the private sector has an ethical, moral, and legal responsibility to ensure the safety and security of their products”.

The administration said it would invest $140m (£111m) in seven new national AI research institutes, to pursue artificial intelligence advances that are “ethical, trustworthy, responsible, and serve the public good”. AI development is dominated by the private sector, with the tech industry producing 32 significant machine-learning models last year, compared with three produced by academia.

Leading AI developers have also agreed to their systems being publicly evaluated at this year’s Defcon 31 cybersecurity conference. Companies that have agreed to participate include OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Stability AI.

“This independent exercise will provide critical information to researchers and the public about the impacts of these models,” said the White House.

Robert Weissman, the president of the consumer rights non-profit Public Citizen, praised the White House’s announcement as a “useful step” but said more aggressive action is needed. Weissman said this should including a moratorium on the deployment of new generative AI technologies, the term for tools such as ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion.

“At this point, Big Tech companies need to be saved from themselves. The companies and their top AI developers are well aware of the risks posed by generative AI. But they are in a competitive arms race and each believes themselves unable to slow down,” he said.

The EU was also told on Thursday that it must protect grassroots AI research or risk handing control of the technology’s development to US firms.

In an open letter coordinated by the German research group Laion – or Large-scale AI Open Network – the European parliament was told that one-size-fits-all rules risked eliminating open research and development.

“Rules that require a researcher or developer to monitor or control downstream use could make it impossible to release open-source AI in Europe,” which would “entrench large firms” and “hamper efforts to improve transparency, reduce competition, limit academic freedom, and drive investment in AI overseas”, the letter said.

“Europe cannot afford to lose AI sovereignty. Eliminating open-source R&D will leave the European scientific community and economy critically dependent on a handful of foreign and proprietary firms for essential AI infrastructure.”

The largest AI efforts, by companies such as OpenAI and Google, are heavily controlled by their creators. It is impossible to download the model behind ChatGPT, for instance, and the paid-for access that OpenAI provides to customers comes with a number of legal and technical restrictions on how it can be used. By contrast, open-source efforts involve creating a model and then releasing it for anyone to use, improve or adapt as they see fit.

“We are working on open-source AI because we think that sort of AI will be more safe, more accessible and more democratic,” said Christoph Schuhmann, the organisational lead at Laion.

More on this story

More on this story

  • US aims to tackle risk of uncontrolled race to develop AI

  • EU urged to protect grassroots AI research or risk losing out to US

  • UK competition watchdog launches review of AI market

  • AI ‘could be as transformative as Industrial Revolution’

  • Chatbot ‘journalists’ found running almost 50 AI-generated content farms

  • ‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton quits Google and warns over dangers of misinformation

  • AI has better ‘bedside manner’ than some doctors, study finds

  • Fresh concerns raised over sources of training material for AI systems

Most viewed

Most viewed

What about AI makes regulation seen as premature, leading few countries to act despite global calls?

What did Hinton, the renowned British-Canadian expert reveal about AI that caused widespread concern?

Exposed serious AI risks, shocking the tech world and affecting major company stocks.

What did Sam Altman admit about ChatGPT and the potential risks of AI?

Advanced AI could pose an existential risk to humanity.

What does Hinton warn could happen to AI if companies and regulators fail to implement effective rules and controls?

Poses ethical risks
Becomes uncontrollable

What future risk did Hinton warn about AI?

What risks did the global summit report highlight about AI?

Creating malicious software for cyberattacks, potentially posing an existential threat if humans lose control.

What about AI makes regulation seen as premature, leading few countries to act despite global calls?

What did Hinton, the renowned British-Canadian expert reveal about AI that caused widespread concern?

Exposed serious AI risks, shocking the tech world and affecting major company stocks.

What did Sam Altman admit about ChatGPT and the potential risks of AI?

Advanced AI could pose an existential risk to humanity.

What does Hinton warn could happen to AI if companies and regulators fail to implement effective rules and controls?

Poses ethical risks
Becomes uncontrollable

What future risk did Hinton warn about AI?

What risks did the global summit report highlight about AI?

Creating malicious software for cyberattacks, potentially posing an existential threat if humans lose control.

Hinton expressed particular worry about AI being misused by malicious actors and the difficulty of preventing such misuse, stating, "It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things" .

What did Hinton, the renowned British-Canadian expert reveal about AI that caused widespread concern?

Exposed serious AI risks, shocking the tech world and affecting major company stocks.

What does Hinton warn could happen to AI if companies and regulators fail to implement effective rules and controls?

What risks did the global summit report highlight about AI?

Creating malicious software for cyberattacks, potentially posing an existential threat if humans lose control.

He also highlighted the risk of AI systems modifying their own code, potentially leading to scenarios where they operate beyond human control .

Title:

Content: Wednesday, December 13, 2023
Generic selectors
Exact matches only
Search in title
Search in content
Post Type Selectors

John Riopelle — obituary

Riopelle, John William It is with great sadness...

A.I. doesn’t bleed

by John Clinton, Ramsay New knowledge merges with...

Breakfast at the Legion, December 16

At the Almonte Legion Sat. December 16 Eggs to...
Science & NatureA.I. doesn't bleed

A.I. doesn’t bleed

by John Clinton, Ramsay

New knowledge merges with old; what you know shapes what you learn. Artificial neural networks have been studied and computer algorithms have been generated to understand how artificial, computer-generated, neurons, would store a concept, and how it would revise that concept if it was flawed.

Geoffrey Hinton, a computer scientist often called ‘the godfather of AI,’ is a leading figure in neural networks; studies inspired by the way neurons are connected in the human brain. A New Yorker magazine piece describes his collaborative work in the 1960s and 1970s developing neural nets that couldn’t do anything better than a child. The technology suddenly improved about a decade ago with the large increase in processing speed and Internet data availability.

According to Google Scholar, Hinton is the second most cited researcher among psychologists and the most cited among computer and cognitive scientists.

Hinton has been worried about the potential of AI to do harm and he often talks about the existential threat that AI might pose to the human species. He has used OpenAI’s ChatGPT and this has made him uneasy. He wrote “Fox News is an oxymoron” asking ChatGPT to explain the joke. (Initial reading of this caused me to ponder – a moron full of oxygen??) The first reply told him that this implied Fox News was fake news. When he called attention to the space between oxy and moron, it explained that Fox News was addictive, like the drug OxyContin. To him, this level of understanding represents a new era in AI.

In nature, wildlife learns how to be intelligent without access to concepts expressed in words. They learn to be smart (survive) through experience. Learning, not knowledge, is the engine of intelligence. There is no use trying to explain complicated ideas that you do not understand. First, you must understand how something works. Otherwise, you just produce nonsense.

Because neural networks are so strange, no one can predict how useful – or dangerous – AI will become. OpenAI’s GPT models involve billions of artificial neurons (data) which are profoundly different than biological brains. They are not alive. Our intuitions tell us that nothing resident in a browser tab could really be thinking in the way we do.

Because a human brain can run on oatmeal, the world can support billions of brains, all different. Each brain can learn continuously, rather than being trained once, then pushed out into the world (ship it!).

If the brain dies, the knowledge dies. If a computer dies, load up another computer. Ten thousand neural nets can learn ten thousand different things at the same time and share what they have learned. This immortality (knowledge perpetuity) and replicability suggest we should be concerned about digital intelligence taking over from biological intelligence.

Current AI technology is talkative and intellectual. The problems of physical intuition will be the challenge of the next decade says Yann LeCun, a French computer scientist. A teenager can learn to drive a car in twenty hours of practice with little supervision. AI systems don’t come close to doing this – except self-driving cars – and they are over-engineered, requiring the mapping of whole cities, hundreds of engineers, and hundreds of thousands of hours of training.

And then there is the problem of what some researchers call AI ‘hallucination’, which Hinton names ‘confabulation.’ AI systems confabulate by making up plausible answers to questions that stump them. In the human mind, there is no boundary between just making it up and telling the truth. Telling the truth is just making it up correctly. ChatGPT’s ability to make things up is a flaw, but also a sign of its humanlike intelligence.

When Hinton began his research, no one thought the technology would succeed. When it started to succeed, no one thought it would succeed so quickly. He expects AI will contribute to many fields, but he fears what will happen when powerful people abuse it. Think autonomous weapons. Hinton warns that even benign autonomous systems could wreak havoc. Yann LeCun has said there is an idea that if a system is intelligent it is going to want to dominate. But the desire to dominate has nothing to do with intelligence – it has to do with testosterone.

Recently, Hinton did not sign a popular petition that called for at least a six-month pause in AI research.

“China is not going to stop development for six months.”

“So what should we do?”

“I don’t know. If this were like climate change where we either must stop burning carbon or find a way to remove carbon from the atmosphere, we know what the solution looks like. Here, with AI, it’s not like that.”

Think of the AI story in which our intuitions about the specialness of the human mind are being dislodged by thinking machines, or, having stolen fire, we risk being burned.

Are we fooling ourselves, being taken in by our own machines and the companies that hope to profit from them? By seeking to re-create the knowledge systems in our heads, have we seized the forbidden apple? Have we risked exile from our charmed world? But who would choose not to know how knowing works?

Related

FOLLOW US

Latest

From the Archives

Title:

Content: South Korea will host the second global AI (artificial intelligence) safety summit on May 21-22, six months after Britain held the inaugural event at Bletchley Park.

In a statement published on Friday, government officials said the event would build on the "Bletchley Declaration", an agreement between countries - including the U.S. and China - to cooperate on AI safety.

CONTEXT

When Microsoft-backed OpenAI released ChatGPT in late 2022, many were impressed, while some were alarmed.

Former Google researcher and "godfather of AI" Geoffrey Hinton said the technology posed a more urgent threat to the world than climate change. Elon Musk called for an immediate pause in the development of such systems.

In November last year, Britain hosted the first AI Safety Summit, bringing together world leaders, tech moguls and academics to discuss how best to regulate the rapidly developing technology.

After the two-day event, more than 25 government representatives signed a joint declaration agreeing that countries would work together and establish a common approach on oversight.

In order to keep pace with the technology, it was agreed that future summits would take place every six months. South Korea will hold a largely virtual event in May, with France hosting the next in-person summit later in 2024.

KEY QUOTES

"The AI Safety Summit held in Bletchley last year marked a milestone in which the government, industry and academia came together to address the potential risks of AI, and I am pleased that the Republic of Korea takes the baton from the UK," said Lee Jong-Ho of South Korea's ministry of science and information and communication technology.

"AI is advancing at an unprecedented pace that exceeds our expectations, and it is crucial to establish global norms and governance to harness such technological innovations to enhance the welfare of humanity."

(Reporting by Martin Coulter; editing by Mark Heinrich)

How does Hinton think AI could escape human control?

By writing their own computer code to modify themselves..

What did Hinton, the renowned British-Canadian expert reveal about AI that caused widespread concern?

Exposed serious AI risks, shocking the tech world and affecting major company stocks.

What did Sam Altman admit about ChatGPT and the potential risks of AI?

Advanced AI could pose an existential risk to humanity.

What does Hinton warn could happen to AI if companies and regulators fail to implement effective rules and controls?

What future risk did Hinton warn about AI?

What risks did the global summit report highlight about AI?

Creating malicious software for cyberattacks, potentially posing an existential threat if humans lose control.

How does Hinton think AI could escape human control?

By writing their own computer code to modify themselves..

What did Hinton, the renowned British-Canadian expert reveal about AI that caused widespread concern?

Exposed serious AI risks, shocking the tech world and affecting major company stocks.

What did Sam Altman admit about ChatGPT and the potential risks of AI?

Advanced AI could pose an existential risk to humanity.

What does Hinton warn could happen to AI if companies and regulators fail to implement effective rules and controls?

What future risk did Hinton warn about AI?

What risks did the global summit report highlight about AI?

Creating malicious software for cyberattacks, potentially posing an existential threat if humans lose control.

Hinton has even said that AI poses a more urgent threat to humanity than climate change .

Title:

Content: These are the 4 jobs that are set to disappear in a decade, and the ones that will take over

May 6, 2023, 10:00 AM UTC
A fax machine was memorably dispatched in the classic workplace comedy "Office Space."
Getty Images

If you’re concerned about ChatGPT and artificial intelligence snapping up your job, you’re far from the only one. Millions of jobs could be going away, according to a huge new report on the “Future of Jobs” by the World Economic Forum, the nonprofit that made Davos famous. That’s the bad news, of course. The good news is that most workers are safe (in the near term).

These artificial intelligence inventions don’t rival human ingenuity—although their capacity to grow more intelligent than humans is real. Geoffrey Hinton, the scientist nicknamed “the godfather of A.I.,” recently resigned from Google and started airing his concerns about the tech’s breathtaking potential. (Did you know that humans have roughly 86 billion neurons in our skulls, but ChatGPT already has between 500 billion and one trillion connections? “How do we survive that?” Hinton asks.}

The WEF argues what’s becoming quite clear: Time is running out now for millions of roles, especially those trying to resist digital transformation, before they go the way of the fax machine.

By 2027, the WEF projects, nearly 70 million new jobs will be created worldwide and 83 million will be eliminated. That constitutes a reduction in employment of 14 million jobs, or 2% of the global workforce.

In order to avoid being one of those 14 million workers stuck without work, you’ll want to take one of today’s fastest-growing roles—driven by technology, digitalization and sustainability.

The jobs of the future (according to Davos)

Unsurprisingly, the majority of the fastest-growing jobs are tech-related. A.I. and Machine Learning Specialists top the WEF’s list, followed by Sustainability Specialists, Business Intelligence Analysts and Information Security Specialists.

As the world gradually moves towards renewable energy, Architects and Surveyors, Renewable Energy Engineers, and Solar Energy Installation and System Engineers will also be high-growth roles, WEF found.

These findings dovetail with WEF’s assertion that the top three skills that will become most important over the next five years are creative thinking, analytical thinking, and technological literacy—none of which can be automated. And employers’ desire for these skills shows the continual importance of complex problem-solving, WEF wrote.

On the other side of the coin, the fastest-declining roles are also driven down by the advent of tech and automation. The majority of those roles are clerical, administrative or secretarial. WEF expects four in particular to decline the fastest: Bank Tellers, Postal Service Clerks, Cashiers and Ticket Clerks and Data Entry Clerks.

And even if your job isn’t on this list, you may not be immune. Nearly a quarter of all professions—even the ones that won’t grow or shrink dramatically—will change some way, somehow, as a result of A.I. and digitization over the next five years, WEF says.

Jobs on the rise

In collaboration with LinkedIn, the WEF tabulated the 100 roles that have grown fastest, consistently and globally, since 2018.

Sixteen of the top 100 jobs on the list called “Jobs on the Rise” are in tech and IT. Sales and customer engagement-related jobs, however, take the cake, with 22 of the 100 roles. That suggests an increasing focus on broadening customer groups during a time of rapid technological advancement.

Also prominently featured: HR and talent acquisition roles, including a specific spot for “Information Technology Recruitment.” Perhaps, WEF writes, that illustrates “the increasing difficulty and importance of accessing talent in a generally strong labor market.”

One job title—workplace coordinator—has grown 39% since 2018 on LinkedIn’s job boards, which might indicate companies are struggling to ease into functional and satisfactory hybrid work arrangements

Luckily for workers, even those in industries that WEF predicts will shrink, with some tech upskilling, they have the upper hand. Dan Shapero, chief operating officer of LinkedIn, told Fortune he doesn’t believe the power is shifting back to bosses anytime soon. “The long-term trend, I think, is pretty clear,” he said.

“Employers are still having difficulty finding the people they need, even in the current labor market,” he said. “[That’s] because the long-term trend towards your technical skills is just undeniable, and we can’t keep up with it.”

Subscribe to Well Adjusted, our newsletter full of simple strategies to work smarter and live better, from the Fortune Well team. Sign up today.

Read More

Great ResignationCompensationReturn to WorkCareersLaborSuccess Stories

Hinton’s warnings made headlines because of his stature in the field and the gravity of his concerns.

His resignation sparked widespread debate, with over 1,000 tech leaders, including Elon Musk, signing a letter calling for a pause in AI development until safety protocols are established .

Title:

Content: Governments, firms should spend more on AI safety, top researchers say

By

'At least one third of their AI research and development funding'.

Artificial intelligence companies and governments should allocate at least one third of their AI research and development funding to ensuring the safety and ethical use of the systems, top AI researchers said in a paper.

The paper, issued a week before the international AI Safety Summit in London, lists measures that governments and companies should take to address AI risks.

"Governments should also mandate that companies are legally liable for harms from their frontier AI systems that can be reasonably foreseen and prevented," according to the paper written by three Turing Award winners, a Nobel laureate, and more than a dozen top AI academics.

Currently there are no broad-based regulations focusing on AI safety, and the first set of legislation by the European Union is yet to become law as lawmakers are yet to agree on several issues.

"Recent state of the art AI models are too powerful, and too significant, to let them develop without democratic oversight," said Yoshua Bengio, one of the three people known as the godfather of AI.

"It (investments in AI safety) needs to happen fast, because AI is progressing much faster than the precautions taken," he said.

Authors include Geoffrey Hinton, Andrew Yao, Daniel Kahneman, Dawn Song and Yuval Noah Harari.

Since the launch of OpenAI's generative AI models, top academics and prominent CEOs such as Elon Musk have warned about the risks on AI, including calling for a six-month pause in developing powerful AI systems.

Some companies have countered this, saying they will face high compliance costs and disproportionate liability risks.

"Companies will complain that it's too hard to satisfy regulations - that 'regulation stifles innovation' - that's ridiculous," said British computer scientist Stuart Russell.

"There are more regulations on sandwich shops than there are on AI companies."

Got a news tip for our journalists? Share it with us anonymously here.
Tags:

Most Read Articles

Services Australia's digital credential sharing with NSW on ice

CBA to test products and messaging on AI-created 'customers'

Australian Federal Police officers using more online face search tools

ANZ targets 3000 engineers to use GitHub Copilot

Log In

  |  Forgot your password?

What did Hinton, the renowned British-Canadian expert reveal about AI that caused widespread concern?

Exposed serious AI risks, shocking the tech world and affecting major company stocks.

What did Hinton, the renowned British-Canadian expert reveal about AI that caused widespread concern?

Exposed serious AI risks, shocking the tech world and affecting major company stocks.

Other experts, such as Sam Altman of OpenAI, echoed Hinton’s concerns and advocated for legislative regulation of AI .

What did Hinton, the renowned British-Canadian expert reveal about AI that caused widespread concern?

Exposed serious AI risks, shocking the tech world and affecting major company stocks.