At the recent Collision conference in Toronto, Geoffrey Hinton – the godfather of artificial intelligence – again warned of the dangers of the technology.

Geoffrey Hinton was a guest at the Collision conference in Toronto, Canada, his university home. The godfather of AI came to talk about the dangers and risks of a technology he helped develop. He again warned the world to be careful.

The Godfather

As a computer scientist, Hinton was one of the founders of artificial intelligence and even won a Turing Prize for it. In recent months, however, he has expressed strong reservations about the technology at every opportunity.

He now uses his name in the tech world mostly to educate people about the potential threats of artificial intelligence. Earlier this year, Hinton even quit his job at Google to speak openly about the risks and dangers of AI.

real danger

During the collision, Hinton reiterated his concerns. He sees the current situation as 99 bright minds working to make AI stronger and one trying not to let technology take over.

Hinton urges policymakers not to let AI growth spiral out of control. He doesn’t want to stop, he loves it too much for that, as he says himself. But Hinton believes that anyone working with AI must first understand the technology much better in order to properly assess the potential risks.

To support his discourse, Hinton gave a few examples. He finds it positive that the implementation of AI automation increases productivity; but the profit from it does not accrue to the workers. In this way, the poverty gap widens and the rich get richer.

Another danger, according to Hinton, is chatbots that constantly produce fake news. He hopes there’s a way to identify anything that’s fake. A watermark, so to speak, indicating that something was generated by AI.

In addition, he is not convinced that good AI can triumph over bad AI, for example in military applications. The temptation for wars with no human casualties, just machine cannon fodder, is too great, Hinton says. He is also concerned about the potentially huge impact of AI on the job market. He is certainly not alone with the latter, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman has also expressed some reservations in this regard.

contradictions

However, not everyone agrees with Hinton. He’s sometimes called a doomsday prophet, and some people in the industry believe he’s exaggerating. Several voices were raised at the Collision that see the future of AI as much brighter and that too much regulation is unnecessary.

Hinton recognizes that his message is quite negative, but emphasizes that it is about much more than doom and gloom. The (near) future will show who is right.