Artificial intelligence may be disrupting the worlds of government and business recently, but for decades AI research was the domain of obscure researchers who laid the groundwork for the gold rush we’re seeing today.
Now that their child is grown, it’s always interesting to watch these figures come to grips with the world they’ve created. For a perfect example, look no further than a newly resurfaced speech in which AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton gave a fascinating answer when asked a question about superintelligent AI replacing humans.
During the December online lecture, which recently resurfaced on Reddit, the so-called “Godfather of AI” was asked if he would be in favor of a superintelligent AI destroying humanity and replacing it with “something objectively better than belongs to consciousness”.
“I’m actually for it,” the machine learning researcher replied, “but I think it would be wiser for me to say I’m against it.”
Hinton, as you may recall, left Google last spring over fears that AI would fall into the hands of “bad actors” and went so far as to say he regretted his role in developing the networks powerful neural networks that now underlie everything from ChatGPT to Stable Diffusion. .
Given that fairly recent turn of events, it’s surprising that he of all people would make such a remark—and when lecture moderator and MIT technology historian Deborah Fitzgerald asked him to “say more” , things really got more interesting and complicated.
“Well, people don’t like to be replaced,” Hinton said with a laugh.
Prompted by Fitzgerald, he explained by noting that there are many good and “not so good” aspects of humanity, “it is not clear that we are the best form of intelligence”.
“Obviously, from a person’s perspective, it’s all about people,” Hinton continued. “But there may come a point when we see things as ‘humanist’ as racist terms.”
After a long pause, the MIT moderator answered with an “ok” before moving on to the next question. But still, that response is all the more strange given that shortly before he resigned from Google, Hinton said CBS News It’s “not inconceivable” that human-level artificial general intelligence (AGI) could destroy humanity as we know it.
We’ve reached out to Hinton to ask if his views have changed since leaving Google or if he’d like to explain his remarks.
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Image Source : futurism.com