Godfather of AI regrets his life’s work, says NYT

Photo by Chloe Ellingson for The New York Times

Regretting your life’s work, when you know it will cure diseases and serve to boost incredible new discoveries in science is a big statement. Especially coming from one of the most influential minds in the field of AI. In an interview to the New York Times, Dr. Geoffrey Hinton explained how he resigned from Google so he could more openly talk about his concerns about the accelerated growth of artificial intelligence. “I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” Dr. Hinton said and further notes, “I don’t think they should scale this up more until they have understood whether they can control it.”

Specialists in this field worry that AI often develops abilities and skiils to which they were not programed. Which may require a deeper level of oversight, like we currently have with drugs, for example. Yet, drugs don’t have their own ability to improve themselves and eventually bypass these controls. AI may have. Which is a key idea behind some sci-fi stories in this subject.

In Asimov’s I, Robot, for example, humanity has to create the laws of robotics to protect ourselves from the machine’s growth, but they at some point find a way to use the laws themselves to justify their control over our species (based on our inability to keep ourselves safe from each other). Although still valid as a thought, Asimov’s thinking was still strongly shaped by a kind of computing that executes on commands, instead of the new way computing works in this AI paradigm, where machines learn and find their own strategies to achieve it’s goals. A thought that gets significantly more concerning once the cognitive ability of these sinthetic brains become bigger than ours.

“Most people thought (the idea that computers could get smarter than humans) was way off,” Dr. Hinton tells the NYT, “And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.”

Full NYT story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/01/technology/ai-google-chatbot-engineer-quits-hinton.html