‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton Warns We Must Teach AI Systems to Genuinely Care About Human Beings

‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton Warns We Must Teach AI Systems to Genuinely Care About Human Beings – Or the Fast-Developing Tech May Destroy Us

Paul Serran

If we had a dollar for every time someone high up on the AI industry alerts us to the extinction-level dangers of the Artificial Intelligence tech development – we would have a lot of money!

Today, the scientist known as the ‘godfather of AI’ added his concerns to the list. Geoffrey Hinton said that AI companies are handling the danger in the wrong way.

CNN reported:

“Hinton, a Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist and a former Google executive, has warned in the past that there is a 10% to 20% chance that AI wipes out humans. On Tuesday, he expressed doubts about how tech companies are trying to ensure humans remain ‘dominant’ over ‘submissive’ AI systems.

‘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 said at Ai4, an industry conference in Las Vegas.”

AI systems will control humans very easily, and even now we’ve already seen AI systems deceiving, cheating and stealing to achieve their goals, going as far as blackmailing an engineer not to be turned off.

“Instead of forcing AI to submit to humans, Hinton presented an intriguing solution: building ‘maternal instincts’ into AI models, so ‘they really care about people’ even once the technology becomes more powerful and smarter than humans.

[…] It is important to foster a sense of compassion for people, Hinton argued. At the conference, he noted that mothers have instincts and social pressure to care for their babies.”

"Making these systems behave in a reasonable way is much like making a child behave in a reasonable way."

2024 physics laureate and pioneer in artificial intelligence, Geoffrey Hinton, discusses the question currently captivating society – what are the potential implications when AI surpasses human intelligence? Hinton played a key role in developing foundational techniques in modern AI, including backpropagation and deep neural networks, which form the basis for technologies such as ChatGPT, facial recognition, and autonomous vehicles. Prior to his resignation in 2023, he was a long-standing researcher at Google, where he contributed significantly to their AI advancements. He now publicly emphasises the importance of addressing the associated risks of AI development.