Mr Hinton said that it would be alarming if humans lost control of AI.
Geoffrey Hinton, who has been called the "Godfather of Artificial Intelligence," warned of the dangers of AI and wants governments and companies to carefully consider the best ways to safely advance the technology. Mr Hinton retired from Google earlier this year.
In an interview with 60 Minutes, the British computer scientist and cognitive psychologist said, "I think in five years' time, it may well be able to reason better than us."
Mr Hinton is known for his work on the framework for AI. He questioned whether humans completely understand the technology that is seeing rapid development.
"I think we're moving into a period when for the first time ever, we have things more intelligent than us," Mr Hinton said.
He said understanding what technology is thinking is just as difficult as reading a human mind.
"We have a very good idea sort of roughly what it's doing," he said. "But as soon as it gets really complicated, we don't actually know what's going on any more than we know what's going on in your brain."
Mr Hinton said that it would be alarming if humans lost control of AI.
"We're entering a period of great uncertainty where we're dealing with things we've never done before," he said. "And normally the first time you deal with something totally novel, you get it wrong. And we can't afford to get it wrong with these things."
AI has the potential to one day take over from humanity, Mr Hinton warned.
"I'm not saying it will happen. If we could stop them ever wanting to, that would be great. But it's not clear we can stop them ever wanting to," Mr Hinton said.
Mr Hinton believes AI will help in increasing productivity and efficiency, but he worries about the potential risk that many people could lose their jobs to artificial intelligence and there may not be enough jobs to replace those that are lost.
He said now is the time to run experiments to understand AI better and pass laws to ensure the technology is ethically used.