Geoffrey Hinton dedicated his career to researcha neural network, a mathematical and computational system who learns skills through data analysis and started to the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Now that Google and Microsoft They face aggressive competitionfor creating AI-based products, like the popular ChatGPT, Hinton joins the chorus of critics who warn that this technology threatens humanity.
I console myself with the usual excuse: If I hadn’t done it, I would have. done by someone else,” said the 75-year-old British computer scientistknown as the “godfather of artificial intelligence in an interview published this Monday by the American newspaper The New York Times.
After resigning from his job at Google, Hinton shared his fears regarding the development of a technology that works better than the human brainoh no one has guarantees How can you keep yourself under control?
“I don’t think they should expand this further until they understand if they can control it,” said Hinton, who won in 2018 together with two of his students the Turing Prize, known as the Nobel Prize in computing.
He said he was convinced that as that companies improve its AI, systems they become more and more dangerous. Look how it was five years ago and how it is now,” he said. «Take the difference and project it forward. It’s scary.”
Google versus Microsoft
First of all, Hinton analyzed the impact that lAI could have on the consumption of digital content. His most immediate concern is that The internet will be filled with fake photos, videos and texts and the average user “will no longer be able to tell what is true.”
In his opinion, Google acted “very responsibly” and as a “good administrator” of AI until last year, taking the precaution of not launch products that could do harm.
However, since Microsoft expanded its Bing search engine with a chatbot, challenging business google Headquarters, A race broke out between the tech giants who “might be impossible to stop.”
After the interview was published, Hinton clarified in his account from Twitter who hadn’t given up on Googlee to be able to criticize the company. “Actually, I left so I could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how it affects this to Google.
“Killer Robots”
Another of Hinton’s concerns is how AI It will revolutionize the labor market. Instead of complementing humans, it could replace them in innumerable trades in which routine tasks are performed.
“The drudgery is removed” but “It could take away more than that,” he said.
His biggest concern is that future technologies threaten humanity. and truly autonomous weapons such as “killer robots” are developed.
AI systems “they often learn unexpected behavior from the large amount of data they analyze,” explained. “People and companies allow to AI systems not only generate their own code, but also run that code on its own.”
“Some people believed in the idea that these things they could become smarter than people,” he said. «But most thought it was too far away. I thought it was too far. I thought it was 30-50 years away or even more. Obviously, I don’t think that anymore.”
Although this is a hypothetical threat, Hinton predicted that the competition between Google, Microsoft and others will become a career global without international regulations.
He recalled that unlike nuclear weapons, there is no way to know if companies or countries are working on AI in secret.
your greatest hope is that the world’s leading scientists collaborate on ways to control this technology.