Former Google executive Geoffrey Hinton, also known as the ‘Godfather of AI’, fears that artificial intelligence could wipe out humanity in the future and that “tech bros” are taking the wrong approach to the technology. The Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist, in an interaction with CNN, said that there is a 10 to 20% chance that AI wipes out humans and expressed doubts about how companies are trying to ensure that humans remain “dominant” over “submissive” AI systems.
Speaking at Ai4, an industry conference in Las Vegas, Hinton said, “That’s not going to work. They’re going to be much smarter than us. They’re going to have all sorts of ways to get around that.”
Hinton went on to warn that, in the future, AI systems would be able to control humans just as easily as an adult can bribe a 3-year-old with candy. In such a scenario, Hinton has given a unique solution to protect humanity — he suggests building “maternal instincts” into AI models so that “they really care about people” even when the technology becomes more powerful than humans.
AI systems “will very quickly develop two subgoals, if they’re smart: One is to stay alive… (and) the other subgoal is to get more control.”
“There is good reason to believe that any kind of agentic AI will try to stay alive,” he added.
Geoffrey Hinton on risks of AI: ‘We’ll be history’
Speaking about the risks of AI to CNN, Hinton said, “Most of the AI experts believe that sometime in the next five to 20 years, we’ll make ais that are smarter than people, and they’ll probably end up much smarter than people, and there’s very few examples we know of smarter things being controlled by less smart things.”
“In fact, pretty much the only example we know is a mother being controlled by her baby to make that happen. Evolution built maternal instincts into the mother, and if we don’t do something like that with these alien beings we are creating, we’ll be history” Hinton added
