The British-Canadian computer scientist and winner of this year’s Nobel prize in Physics has said that Artificial intelligence could wipe out the human race within the next decade.
Prof Geoffrey Hinton (77), who is known as the “Godfather” of AI has admitted regrets about his part in creating the technology, likened its rapid development to the industrial revolution – but warned the machines could “take control” this time.
Asked on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme if anything had changed his analysis, he said: “Not really. I think 10 to 20 [years], if anything. We’ve never had to deal with things more intelligent than ourselves before.
“And how many examples do you know of a more intelligent thing being controlled by a less intelligent thing? There are very few examples,” the Telegraph reported.
He said the technology had developed “much faster” than he expected and could make humans the equivalents of “three-year-olds” and AI “the grown-ups”.
Last year, Hinton made headlines after resigning from his job at Google in order to speak more openly about the risks posed by unconstrained AI development, citing concerns that “bad actors” would use the technology to harm others. A key concern of AI safety campaigners is that the creation of artificial general intelligence, or systems that are smarter than humans, could lead to the technology posing an existential threat by evading human control, The Guardian recalled.
