Elon Musk and White House requesting for my help, says ‘Godfather of AI’

The man generally called the “Godfather of artificial intelligence", Dr Geoffrey Hinton, has said that he will respond to the requests received from Twitter CEO Elon Musk, the White House and politician Bernie Sanders, days after he quit Google and warned the world about the risk that AI carries with itself.

Dr Hinton, 75, was given the Turing Award,the highest honour of computer science, in 2018 for his work on “deep learning”, along with the University of Montreal’s Yoshua Bengio and Meta’s Yann Lecun.

The technology behind the AI revolution has emerged from the efforts of Dr Hinton to understand the human brain. However, the computer scientist may not give the advice that the world leaders want to hear.

“The US government inevitably has a lot of concerns around national security. And I tend to disagree with them. For example, I’m sure that the defence department considers that the only safe hands for this stuff is the US defence department – the only group of people to actually use nuclear weapons,” he said while speaking to The Guardian.

“I’m a socialist. I think that private ownership of the media, and of the ‘means of computation’, is not good,” Hinton added.

“If you view what Google is doing in the context of a capitalist system, it’s behaving as responsibly as you could expect it to do. But that doesn’t mean it’s trying to maximise utility for all people: it’s legally obliged to maximise utility for its shareholders, and that’s a very different thing,” he said.

Since Hinton spoke on Monday about the fears of AI which can end the civilisation in 20 years, he has been receiving new requests to talk every two minutes.

However, he has not been able to offer a piece of concrete advice. “I’m not a policy guy. I’m just someone who’s suddenly become aware that there’s a danger of something really bad happening. I wish I had a nice solution, like: ‘Just stop burning carbon, and you’ll be OK.’ But I can’t see a simple solution like that,” he said.

Artificial intelligence's rapid progress in the past year has made Dr Hinton talk aboutthe threat that digital intelligence carries.

“For the last 50 years, I’ve been trying to make computer models that can learn stuff a bit like the way the brain learns it, in order to understand better how the brain is learning things. But very recently, I decided that maybe these big models are actually much better than the brain,” the godfather of AI said.

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“We need to think hard about it now, and if there’s anything we can do. The reason I’m not that optimistic is that I don’t know any examples of more intelligent things being controlled by less intelligent things,” he added.

“You need to imagine something that is more intelligent than us by the same degree that we are more intelligent than a frog. It’s all very well to say: ‘Well, don’t connect them to the internet,’ but as long as they’re talking to us, they can make us do things,” he warned.

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