Turing prize winner Geoffrey Hinton, widely known as the “Godfather of Artificial Intelligence”, has joined several other tech pioneers and notables in warning about the dangers of artificial intelligence.
75 year old Hinton announced his resignation from Google in a statement to the New York Times, saying he now regretted his work.
Hinton, who was partially responsible for the development of the AI technology that is used by the biggest companies in the tech industry, warned that “bad actors” would try to use AI for “bad things”.
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TGP reports: On Monday, Hinton tweeted “In the NYT today, Cade Metz implies I left Google so that I could criticize Google. Actually, I left so that I could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts Google. Google has acted very responsibly.”
Hinton originally believed that we were 30 to 50 years away from reaching a critical point in AI development, however he now says “I no longer think that.”
He said that a part of him regrets helping with the development of AI and that it could one day replace people in the workforce and help disseminate misinformation. Hinton told the New York Times, “I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have.”
New York Times reports:
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 — challenging Google’s core business — Google is racing to deploy the same kind of technology. The tech giants are locked in a competition that might be impossible to stop, Dr. Hinton said.
His immediate concern is that the internet will be flooded with false photos, videos and text, and the average person will “not be able to know what is true anymore.”
