Geoffrey Hinton, regarded by many as the 'godfather of artificial intelligence' (AI) has revealed that there is 10 to 20 per cent risk of AI taking control away from humans in the future. Mr Hinton, who was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in physics alongside John Hopfield, said AI systems were quickly evolving and that the majority were unaware of what is about to come.
"People haven't got it yet, people haven't understood what's coming," warned Mr Hinton in a CBS interview.
"I'm in the unfortunate position of happening to agree with Elon Musk on this, which is that there's a 10 to 20 per cent chance that these things will take over, but that's just a wild guess," he added.
Mr Hinton was referring to the Tesla CEO, who has claimed that AI will become smarter than the entire human race by 2029. Mr Musk is also the chief executive of xAI, the company that developed the AI chatbot Grok.
According to Mr Hinton, AI companies should dedicate a "third of their computing power" or significantly more resources to safety research.
"If you look at what the big companies are doing right now, they're lobbying to get less AI regulation. There's hardly any regulation as it is, but they want less," Mr Hinton said.
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Warning about AI
Mr Hinton laid the foundations for machine learning that is powering today's AI-based products and applications. However, the Nobel laureate grew wary of AI's future development and cut ties with his employer, Google, in order to speak more freely on the issue.
"It will be comparable with the industrial revolution. But instead of exceeding people in physical strength, it's going to exceed people in intellectual ability. We have no experience of what it's like to have things smarter than us," said Mr Hinton at the time.
"I am worried that the overall consequence of this might be systems more intelligent than us that eventually take control."
Mr Hinton has been a big advocate of government regulation for the technology, especially given the exceptional pace of development.
Apart from Mr Hinton, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has also warned about the perils of AI. In a recent interview, Mr Hassabis said society is not ready for human-level AI, popularly referred to as Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner said AI systems capable of human-level cognitive abilities were only five to ten years away and that such development was keeping him up at night.
