Geoffrey Hinton, who is known as the “godfather of AI,” is a famous computer scientist. He has warned that the world needs to find ways to control the growth of AI, which could have disastrous effects. In an interview with EL PAS, Hinton said that the world shouldn’t wait for AI to be smarter than humans before taking control of it as it grows.
AI has the ability to make huge improvements in many fields, like health and disaster prediction, but Hinton thinks there is still a lot of work to be done to understand and control its risks. Hinton used the need for states to require that fake pictures be marked as an example of why this is important.
He also said that AI could cause many problems, such as the loss of work and the spread of false information. Hinton thinks that Artificial Intelligence could even be smarter than humans in five to twenty years, which he said was a rough guess.
Hinton is especially worried about the alignment problem, which he thinks is the biggest risk that AI poses. He said that artificial intelligence doesn’t have goals built in and that it’s important to make sure that AI has goals that help people. Hinton worries that people who want to make robot troops could give machines the ability to make their own targets, which would make them hard to manage.
Hinton thinks that even though Google has done the right thing, other companies might not do the same in a competitive system. He said he didn’t think the US government system could successfully control Artificial Intelligence since it can’t even make easy decisions like not giving assault guns to teens.
In the end, Hinton said that we need a lot of smart and creative people to figure out how to stop AI from getting too smart. The world needs to take charge of AI’s growth and figure out how to stop its bad effects, like job loss and the spread of fake news.
