Insights

Too much discourse focuses on whether AIs are the end of society or the end of human suffering – I’m more interested in the middle ground

Alex Hern@alexhern

Tue 9 May 2023 11.56 BST

What if AI doesn’t fundamentally reshape civilisation?

This week, I spoke to Geoffrey Hinton, the English psychologist-turned-computer scientist whose work on neural networks in the 1980s set the stage for the explosion in AI capabilities over the last decade. Hinton wanted to speak to deliver a message to the world: he is afraid of the technology he helped create.

You need to imagine something more intelligent than us by the same difference that we’re more intelligent than a frog. And it’s going to learn from the web, it’s going to have read every single book that’s ever been written on how to manipulate people, and also seen it in practice.”He now thinks the crunch time will come in the next five to 20 years, he says. “But I wouldn’t rule out a year or two. And I still wouldn’t rule out 100 years – it’s just that my confidence that this wasn’t coming for quite a while has been shaken by the realisation that biological intelligence and digital intelligence are very different, and digital intelligence is probably much better.”

Hinton is not the first big figure in AI development to sound the alarm, and he won’t be the last. The undeniable – and accelerating – improvement in the underlying technology lends itself easily to visions of unending progress. The clear possibility of a flywheel effect, where progress itself begets further progress, adds to the potential. Researchers are already seeing good results, for instance, on using AI-generated data to train new AI models, while others are incorporating AI systems into everything from chip design to data-centre operations.

Read the original article from theguardian.com.