Guardian interview with Geoffrey Hinton: Why the godfather of AI fears for humanity

[highplainsdem]

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/05/geoffrey-hinton-godfather-of-ai-fears-for-humanity

A “biological intelligence” such as ours, he says, has advantages. It runs at low power, “just 30 watts, even when you’re thinking”, and “every brain is a bit different”. That means we learn by mimicking others. But that approach is “very inefficient” in terms of information transfer. Digital intelligences, by contrast, have an enormous advantage: it’s trivial to share information between multiple copies. “You pay an enormous cost in terms of energy, but when one of them learns something, all of them know it, and you can easily store more copies. So the good news is, we’ve discovered the secret of immortality. The bad news is, it’s not for us.”

Once he accepted that we were building intelligences with the potential to outthink humanity, the more alarming conclusions followed. “I thought it would happen eventually, but we had plenty of time: 30 to 50 years. I don’t think that any more. And I don’t know any examples of more intelligent things being controlled by less intelligent things – at least, not since Biden got elected.

“You need to imagine something more intelligent than us by the same difference that we’re more intelligent than a frog. And it’s going to learn from the web, it’s going to have read every single book that’s every been written on how to manipulate people, and also seen it in practice.”

He now thinks the crunch time will come in the next five to 20 years, he says. “But I wouldn’t rule out a year or two. And I still wouldn’t rule out 100 years – it’s just that my confidence that this wasn’t coming for quite a while has been shaken by the realisation that biological intelligence and digital intelligence are very different, and digital intelligence is probably much better.”

Much more at the link.

I was amused by his comment about Trump as a "less intelligent thing" who, until Biden was elected, controlled more intelligent things.

But the rest of what he had to say is very worrisome.

Like Max Tegmark of MIT, whose warnings I've also posted, Hinton blames the risk on an AI arms race between companies that itself is the result of "a capitalist system" in which "if your competitor then does do that, there’s nothing you can do but do the same."

[moondust]

1. Agree.

Last edited Fri May 5, 2023, 10:10 PM - Edit history (2)

I heard a story recently about somebody using AI/Chatbot stuff to extort money. Forget how it went now but it was something like: they pretended to have kidnapped a child and imitated the child's voice to call the mother and demand a ransom. Don't recall if the ransom was paid but the child was never kidnapped.

And I believe it could get much, much worse than that, potentially catastrophic.

This may have been that case: https://www.nbc15.com/2023/04/10/ive-got-your-daughter-mom-warns-terrifying-ai-voice-cloning-scam-that-faked-kidnapping/