Renowned British-Canadian computer scientist, Geoffrey Hinton, widely known as the ‘Godfather of AI’, has issued a chilling warning about rapid surge of artificial intelligence, warning that super-intelligent AI or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), has the potential to wipe out the entire human race if safety measures are not embedded within its system.
Why Geoffrey Hinton believes AI could wipe out humanity?
Speaking at the Ai4 conference in Las Vegas, Geoffrey Hinton presented an unconventional proposal to ensure AI safety, suggesting that “maternal instincts” must be embedded into AI systems so they can learn to protect and care for human beings. The 77-year-old AI pioneer noted that human dominance over AI will become unviable once AI systems become more intelligent than humans, enabling them to bypass limitations imposed by their human creators.
Hinton believes that any efforts to keep AI “submissive” are doomed to fail because a super-intelligent AI will have more problem-solving capabilities and creativity than its creators.
What is Hinton’s ‘maternal instinct’ design?
The Nobel laureate suggested that the design of AI system must be inspired by the relationship humans share with their offspring, noting that integrating the “maternal care” instinct would enable AI to become naturally inclined towards the care and protection of human beings, and such systems would be less likely act against interests of the human race.
“Super- intelligent caring AI mothers, most of them won’t want to get rid of the maternal instinct because they don’t want us to die,” Geoffrey Hinton said, arguing that his model could be more sustainable than rigid control measures which AI is bound to escape from as it becomes more intelligent.
The celebrated AI scientist also updated his timeline for the emergence of an AGI, predicting that such an entity could now become a reality within the next five to twenty years, based on the current speed of development and advancements in the field .
Who is Geoffrey Hinton?
Geoffrey Everest Hinton is a British-Canadian computer scientist and cognitive psychologist, known for his groundbreaking work on artificial neural networks, which earned him the title “Godfather of AI”. A brilliant student since his early years, Hinton joined the Clifton College in Bristol and then the famed King’s College in Cambridge.
In an interview, Hinton revealed he was unsure which course he wanted to take and kept changing subjects between natural science, history of art and philosophy, finally earning a Bachelors degree in experimental psychology in 1970. Eight years later, Hinton received a doctorate (PhD) in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in 1978 from the University of Edinburgh, and started tenure at the University of Sussex.
However, Geoffrey Hinton found fund hard to come by and moved to the United States where he worked at the the University of California, San Diego and Carnegie Mellon University. Hinton was also the founding director of the Gatsby Charitable Foundation Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London.