The 'Godfather of AI' has revealed the only way in which humanity can survive superintelligent technology following his recent warning about our future.
Geoffrey Hinton is well known for his work on artificial neural networks and, much like the creators of office cubicles and Flappy Bird, he has seemingly come to regret what he helped to invent.
Artificial intelligence seems to be on its way to taking over our lives and is getting harder to discern each day, with the Will Smith spaghetti video emphasising just how far the technology has come.
Naturally, while some people are busy using AI tools for basic requests, or even falling in love with it, most sensible folks are concerned about how AI could easily take over the human race in the future.
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Speaking to CBS in April, Hinton compared AI to owning a tiger cub, saying: "The best way to understand it emotionally is we are like somebody who has this really cute tiger cub.
"Unless you can be very sure that it's not gonna want to kill you when it's grown up, you should worry."
He added: "How many examples do you know of a more intelligent thing being controlled by a less intelligent thing? There are very few examples.
"The situation we’re in now is that most of the experts in the field think that sometime, within probably the next 20 years, we’re going to develop AIs that are smarter than people. And that’s a very scary thought."
Although I'm fairly confident we can still outrun AI-powered humanoids, if the recent 'Robot Olympics' in Beijing are anything to go by, our ability to out-think the technology appears to be rapidly diminishing.
And now Hinton has revealed the only way in which we can prevent what seems to be an almost inevitable enslavement of humanity, and it's not by saying please and thank you when you use ChatGPT.
Speaking at Ai4, an industry conference in Las Vegas, the 77-year-old Nobel Prize winner expressed doubts about how tech companies are trying to ensure humans remain 'dominant' over 'submissive' AI systems.
As per CNN, he 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 instead suggests that we should build 'maternal instincts' into AI programs so that they 'care' about humanity.
He believes that 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'.
Hinton continued: “There is good reason to believe that any kind of agentic AI will try to stay alive.
“The right model is the only model we have of a more intelligent thing being controlled by a less intelligent thing, which is a mother being controlled by her baby.
“That’s the only good outcome. If it’s not going to parent me, it’s going to replace me,” he said. “These super-intelligent caring AI mothers, most of them won’t want to get rid of the maternal instinct because they don’t want us to die.”
So, we'd best hope that some of the new AI companies work on technology that cares about us and makes us eat our vegetables, rather than ones that will seek to take over the world.
Topics: AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology
James Moorhouse