Artificial intelligence could wipe out the human race within the next decade, the “Godfather of AI” has warned.
Prof Geoffrey Hinton, who 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.
The 77-year-old British computer scientist, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics this year, called for tighter government regulation of AI firms.
Prof Hinton has previously predicted there was a 10 percent chance AI could lead to the downfall of humankind within three decades.
Asked on BBC Radio 4’s Today program if anything had changed his analysis, he said: “Not really. I think 10 to 20 [percent], 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.”
In the 1980s, Prof Hinton invented a method that can autonomously find properties in data and identify specific elements in pictures, which was foundational to modern AI.
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”.
“I think it’s like the industrial revolution,” he continued. “In the industrial revolution, human strength [became less relevant] because machines were just stronger – if you wanted to dig a ditch, you dug it with a machine.
“What we’ve got now is something that’s replacing human intelligence. And just ordinary human intelligence will not be the cutting edge anymore; it will be machines.”
Prof Hinton predicted AI would change ordinary people’s lives dramatically, just as the Industrial Revolution did, as documented by Charles Dickens.
He said what the future held for life with the technology would “depend very much on what our political systems do with this technology”.
“My worry is that even though it will cause huge increases in productivity, which should be good for society, it may end up being very bad for society if all the benefit goes to the rich and a lot of people lose their jobs and become poorer,” he added.
