The Genie Refuses To Be Rebottled

"I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn't done it, somebody else would have."

"Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now. Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That's scary."

"It is hard to see  how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things. [Most people will] not be able to know what is true anymore."

"Right now, they're not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell. But I think they soon may be. What we're seeing is things like GPT-4 eclipses a person in the amount of general knowledge it has and it eclipses them by a long way."

"In terms of reasoning, it's not as good, but it does already do simple reasoning."

"I've come to the conclusion that the kind of intelligence we're developing is very different from the intelligence we have. We're biological systems and these are digital systems. And the big difference is that with digital systems, you have many copies of the same set of weights, the same model of the world. And all these copies can learn separately but share their knowledge instantly."

"So it's as if you had 10,000 people and whenever one person learned something, everybody automatically knew it."

"And that's how these chatbots can know so much more than any one person."

Geoffrey Hinton, Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto 

Artificial intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton is worried that future iterations of AI could become a threat to humans. Reuters

 

The genius behind AI revolutionary machine interactions with people and the world is assailed by compunction. As a computer science professor at University of Toronto, his work was recognized as remarkably innovative, to the extent that Google convinced him to work for them, calling him the "Godfather of Artificial Intelligence". That 'godfather' is nursing the second thoughts of regret viewing the way AI has leapt into the public realm with convincing enhancements he finds nothing short of frightening.

As a result, at age 75, Dr. Hinton left his employment with Google "So that I could talk about the dangers of AI". He made the regretful journey from leading proponent of AI, to become an influential detractor of AI, concerned over its rapid developmental pace from investigation within the scientific community to become a leading doomsayer about its potential and possible harm to humanity through AI's malign manipulation by unscrupulous exploiters.

As he sees it, the most immediate danger is AI's capability in creating convincing false photographs, videos and audio, able to demonstrate events that have not occurred or were not conducted by people seen or heard in the AI-generated content. AI, he says, can also destroy job sectors, replacing human employment. But there are more frightening scenarios, as with AI systems consuming voluminous data, and reaching unexpected conclusions along with the ability of an AI machine to write its own computer code. All of which could lead to a "nightmare scenario", he cautioned in an interview.

He takes care to lay out in simple language the advantage that machines have over humans in learning capacity. Dr. Hinton settled in Canada in 1987 from his native Britain, holding teaching positions in the United States, then working as a computer science professor at University of Toronto where his research was transformational. Breakthroughs in deep learning that revolutionized speech recognition and object classification made by his Toronto research team brought global interest.

He created a startup company with two of his graduate students to focus on ideas and research on deep neural networks emerging from their linked, innovative minds. Innovations so deeply exciting and promising they led Google to buy the company for $44 million in 2012. While still spending time at University of Toronto, in 2016 he was named a vice-president of Google, an engineering fellow operating Google's artificial intelligence laboratory in Toronto.

 

 

Retiring from teaching at U of T, he retained the status of professor emeritus, named a Companion of the Order of Canada in recognition of being "the driving force behind the development of a new form of artificial intelligence". In 2018 his pioneering and influential work in AI was  honoured when he won the A.M. Turing Award, considered the Nobel Price of computing, sharing it with two collaborators, Yann LeCun of Facebook and New York University, and Yoshua Bengio of Universite de Montreal.

"Cade Metz [interviewer] implies that 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", he added. "Most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that."