Artificial intelligence: AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton warns against his own technology

“For decades, the computer scientist researched artificial intelligence. Now Hinton is leaving his employer Google and warns of the dangers of his creation.

The change of heart came rather suddenly. For decades, Geoffrey Hinton had been doing research in his specialty, in Cambridge and Edinburgh, in Toronto and finally at Google in Silicon Valley. And when people asked him if the artificial intelligence (AI) he and his people were working on wasn't dangerous, Hinton always excused himself. With a modified quote from Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb: "If something is technologically attractive, then you go ahead and do it."

But now Hinton has dropped a kind of bombshell himself. He of all people, who is considered one of the most important pioneers of how machines can take over increasingly complicated tasks, has now quit his job at Google. Partly because of this, he admitted in an interview to the magazine Technology Review, because he can no longer remember the many details that are necessary for his work as well as he used to. Above all, however, to act as a reminder. As a warning against a technology that can overwhelm people and even endanger them. "Sometimes I think it's like aliens have landed and people don't even realize it because they speak English so well," he says in the interview.

Dangers from unscrupulous power-mongers

The now 75-year-old sees the greatest danger in the misuse of the technology by unscrupulous power-mongers. Many evil actors wanted to use AI to win wars or influence elections. "Don't think for a second that evil actors wouldn't build hyper-intelligent robots with the aim of killing people. They wouldn't hesitate."

He can talk more freely about all of this if he is no longer with Google. So far, the company has been a good guardian of technology. But he can't talk about the dangers of AI while he's at Google because it could hurt the company's business. He is obviously also worried about how things will go at Google now that Microsoft and Open AI have presented their now famous language model Chat-GPT4 and thus directly threaten Google's core business, search on the web. The competition of the giants could lead to the Internet being flooded with fake photos, videos and texts. Many normal users would then no longer be able to distinguish between what is true and what is false.

Hinton now also seems to regret his life's work. Life's work, one can rightly speak of him. 

Since the 1980s, the computer scientist has been persistently researching how neural networks can be made to learn. 

He is considered one of the fathers of what is still the most important method for this, the so-called backpropagation for fixing the mistakes that AI created. 

Although many other scientists did not see a great future in it, he stuck with it. And believed all these years that it would be a very long time before the technology would work satisfactorily. One of his students at the University of Toronto is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Open AI, which developed the Chat-GPT language model.

But now Hinton sees things differently: "I suddenly changed my views on whether these things will be smarter than us," he says in an interview with Technology Review. "I think they're very close now and they'll be a lot smarter than us in the future. How do we survive?" Hinton now believes there will now be two types of intelligence in the world, biological brains and neural networks. Whether the biological intelligence of humans is enough to stop the thing? Hinton is rather skeptical: "The US can't even agree to keep assault rifles away from teenage boys.""