- Geoffrey Hinton regrets creating AI due to its growing dangers and public inaction
- He warned machines could surpass human intelligence and resist being shut down
- Hinton left Google to freely discuss risks of AI's future development
Geoffrey Hinton, regarded by many as the 'godfather of artificial intelligence' (AI), said he regrets the technology he helped create as the world was failing to take risks associated with it seriously. Hinton predicted that humanity was reaching a stage where the machines could outsmart humans and resist shutdown if not controlled.
"It makes me very sad that I put my life into developing this stuff and that it's now extremely dangerous and people aren't taking the dangers seriously enough," Hinton told BBC Newsnight in an interview.
"We've never been in this situation before of being able to produce things more intelligent than ourselves," he added.
Hinton laid the foundations for machine learning that is powering today's AI-based products and applications. However, he grew wary of AI's future development and cut ties with his employer, Google, in order to speak more freely on the issue.
The Nobel laureate said the biggest mistake that humanity could make now would not be investing in research on how humans can coexist with the intelligent AI systems they have been creating.
"If we create them so they don't care about us, they will probably wipe us out," he added.
'It Gets Scary'
Hinton has previously warned that the technology could get out of hand if AI chatbots manage to develop their language. He added that AI has already demonstrated that it can think terrible thoughts, and it is not unthinkable that the machines could eventually think in ways that humans cannot track or interpret.
"It gets more scary if they develop their own internal languages for talking to each other. I wouldn't be surprised if they developed their own language for thinking, and we have no idea what they're thinking."
Apart from Hinton, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has also warned about the perils of AI. In an interview, Hassabis said society is not ready for human-level AI, popularly referred to as Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
