Geoffrey Hinton, the computer scientist known as a “Godfather of AI,” says the technology he helped create is getting increasingly scary — and not enough people are taking the risks of artificial intelligence seriously.
“There’s risks that come from people misusing AI, and that’s most of the risks and all of the short-term risks. And then there’s risks that come from AI getting super smart and understanding it doesn’t need us,” Hinton, an ex-Google vice president who won the 2018 Turing Award for his decades of pioneering work on AI and deep learning, said on Monday’s podcast episode of “The Diary of a CEO.”
AI’s rapid spread across the world includes a rising number of students using ChatGPT, CEOs mandating the technology’s use in their workplaces and tech luminaries like Mark Cuban and Jensen Huang saying that AI will soon be the differentiator between success and failure, for employees and businesses alike.
But the engineers who build today’s AI systems still don’t fully understand how the technology works and evolves, leaving many of them split on its future. Some predict a future technological uprising where AIs displace humans, and others dismiss the worry as science fiction, Hinton said.
