Geoffrey Hinton, a well-known AI pioneer, has cautioned that artificial intelligence (AI) may pose a greater threat to civilization than climate change.
Hinton, generally regarded as one of the “godfathers of AI,” recently resigned from Alphabet after a decade of service, expressing a desire to speak out on the hazards connected with AI without fear of penalties from his former company. He co-wrote the key paper “Learning representations by back-propagating errors” in 1986, which was a watershed moment in the evolution of the neural networks that underpin AI technology.
Hinton is now among a rising number of notable tech leaders who have openly expressed alarm about the potential threat presented by AI if computers surpass human intellect and take over the world.
Hinton stated, “I wouldn’t like to devalue climate change. I wouldn’t like to say, ‘You shouldn’t worry about climate change.’ That’s a huge risk too. But I think this might end up being more urgent.” He added, “With climate change, it’s very easy to recommend what you should do: you just stop burning carbon. If you do that, eventually things will be okay. For this, it’s not at all clear what you should do.”
The sources for this piece include an article in Reuters.
