Geoffrey Hinton on AI safety
From Nobel Prize Winner Geoff Hinton: AI Is Already Conscious · · Alex Kantrowitz
“I'm actually quite unhappy about it because people right now people should be doing huge amounts of work on how can we contain the risks. There's lots of short-term risks they're not doing enough work on which are very serious. There's societal risks like I believe it's probably going to cause massive unemployment. Nobody knows for sure, okay? But that's going to be terrible for society. And then there's this longer-term risk that it's going to get much smarter than us. And ask yourself, how many examples do you know of where a much smarter thing is controlled by a much less smart thing?”
On , Geoffrey Hinton, Professor Emeritus at University of Toronto, spoke about AI safety during Nobel Prize Winner Geoff Hinton: AI Is Already Conscious on Alex Kantrowitz.
About Geoffrey Hinton
Geoffrey Hinton has stated in multiple recent interviews that he believes advanced AI systems are already conscious, a view he said he rarely emphasizes because it "puts people off from the other safety messages." He argued that chatbots demonstrate genuine understanding, dismissing the "stochastic parrot" claim as "complete nonsense" and asserting that "you can't answer a question unless you understand the question." Hinton described the current model of consciousness as "as wrong as the belief that people were designed by God" and predicted that creating digital intelligences will "completely change our view of what people are." He noted that researchers themselves use language implying awareness, such as describing a chatbot as "aware that it was being tested." Hinton has expressed unhappiness with the trajectory of AI development, citing risks including massive unemployment and the long-term danger of systems becoming much smarter than humans with no clear way for less intelligent beings to control them. He criticized large publicly traded companies, saying they have "a fiducial duty to try and maximize the profits for shareholders" rather than to avoid harming humanity, and argued that "we should be doing intelligent design of these beings, not letting the invisible hand of economic competition design them." Compared to a year or two earlier, Hinton said he is more optimistic about the possibility of designing AI systems that "care about us" or that function only