Geoffrey Hinton: Why AI Poses a Danger to Humanity

The cryptocurrency industry has been significantly influenced by the advancement of artificial intelligence technology. Specifically, the rising popularity of AI-driven chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google Bard has spawned a niche sector of cryptocurrencies themed around this field.

There is a wide array of coins in the market that have experienced exponential growth due to soaring interest in AI.

We have also consulted ChatGPT on various topics, including:

• Will Ethereum Overtake Bitcoin in the Next Five Years?
• Which Five Cryptocurrencies Will Survive in 10 Years?
• What Are the Next Emerging Technologies to Disrupt Crypto?

While it is exciting to discuss topics with an AI that one would normally discuss with peers, there is another side to this development, which Geoffrey Hinton highlights clearly.

The Godfather of Artificial Intelligence

Geoffrey Hinton is a British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist born in 1947 in Wimbledon, London.

He is best known for his work on artificial neural networks and is a former employee of Google. He left the company in May 2023 in a highly publicized exit, voicing public concerns about the risks of artificial intelligence (AI) technology.

Hinton was the first recipient of the Rumelhart Prize in 2001 and is internationally renowned for his work on artificial neural networks, particularly regarding how they can be designed to learn without the need for human teachers. He also won the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs in the field.

He is commonly referred to as one of the godfathers of AI. Now, he has some significant concerns.

We Have Discovered the Secret of Immortality, but There Is a Catch

In an interview with The Guardian, Hinton clarified that he left Google on good terms and has no objections to what the company is doing or has done.

In the article, he compares biological intelligence (the human brain) to digital intelligence, outlining the inefficiencies inherent in human cognition. He notes that while the human brain runs on low power, its approach to information transfer is quite inefficient. Digital intelligence, by contrast, operates differently.

You pay an enormous cost in terms of energy, but when one of them learns something, all of them know it, and you can easily store more copies. So the good news is, we have discovered the secret of immortality. The bad news is, it is not for us.

Essentially, Hinton concluded that humans are building intelligence with the potential to outthink humanity.

I thought it would happen eventually, but we had plenty of time: 30 to 50 years. I don’t think that anymore. And I don’t know any examples of more intelligent things being controlled by less intelligent things.

To make the comparison more comprehensible, the computer scientist compared humans to frogs, adding:

And it (AI) is going to learn from the web; it is going to have read every single book that has ever been written on how to manipulate people, and also seen it in practice.

Snip from the Movie Ex Machina. Source: Movie House Memories

Fears for Humanity

Citing a recent report by Hinton, articles outline the potential dangers of so-called superintelligence.

The Godfather of AI describes scenarios where AI may seek to gain control over numerous aspects of its environment in pursuit of solving complex problems. These aspects even include human manipulation. The scientist believes that AI would not even need an explicit goal of achieving power or destruction to leverage its ability to mimic human behavior.

It is not all doom and gloom, however. He believes there are ways to mitigate catastrophic scenarios, but he also holds the opinion that we have passed the point of no return. Stopping AI development is impossible, nor should it be stopped.

I think we should continue to develop it because it could do wonderful things. But we should put equal effort into mitigating or preventing the possible bad consequences.

How close are we to those bad consequences? Closer than you might think.

I have huge uncertainty at present. It is possible that large language models, having consumed all the documents on the web, won’t be able to go much further unless they can get access to all our private data as well. I don’t want to rule things like that out – I think people who are confident in this situation are crazy.

The right way to think about the odds of a disaster is closer to a simple coin toss than we might like.

Closing Thoughts

Artificial Intelligence is likely to play an increasing role in our lives. In fact, according to ChatGPT (oh, the irony), some of the fields it will impact in the next seven years include:

• Healthcare
• Automation
• Transportation
• Education
• Smart Homes
• Customer Service

Since voicing his concerns, Hinton has come under fire from many who argue he did not follow some of his colleagues who quit earlier. It is easy to reach that conclusion, but it is also easy to overlook the complexity of the problem, which touches on multiple technological, philosophical, and ethical principles.

Perhaps all Hinton is trying to say is that AI’s impact on humanity, whether good or bad, is likely much closer than most of us seem to think.

Featured image courtesy of CBC, submitted to them by Geoffrey Hinton.

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