Geoffrey Hinton, one of the so-called godfathers of artificial intelligence, urged governments on Wednesday to step in and make sure that machines do not take control of society.
Hinton made headlines in May when he announced that he quit
Google after a decade of work to speak more freely on the dangers of AI,
shortly after the release of ChatGPT captured the imagination of the world.
The highly respected AI scientist, who is based at the
University of Toronto, was speaking to a packed audience at the Collision tech
conference in the Canadian city.
The conference brought together more than 30,000 startup
founders, investors and tech workers, most looking to learn how to ride the AI
wave and not hear a lesson on its dangers.
"Before AI is smarter than us, I think the people
developing it should be encouraged to put a lot of work into understanding how
it might try and take control away," Hinton said.
"Right now there are 99 very smart people trying to make
AI better and one very smart person trying to figure out how to stop it taking
over and maybe you want to be more balanced," he said.
Hinton warned that the risks of AI should be taken seriously
despite his critics who believe he is overplaying the risks.
"I think it's important that people understand that
this is not science fiction, this is not just fear mongering," he
insisted. "It is a real risk that we must think about, and we need to
figure out in advance how to deal with it."
Hinton also expressed concern that AI would deepen
inequality, with the massive productivity gain from its deployment going to the
benefit of the rich, and not workers.
"The wealth isn't going to go to the people doing the
work. It is going to go into making the rich richer and not the poorer and
that's very bad for society," he added.
He also pointed to the danger of fake news created by
ChatGPT-style bots and said he hoped that AI-generated content could be marked
in a way similar to how central banks watermark cash money.
"It's very important to try, for example, to mark
everything that is fake as fake. Whether we can do that technically, I don't
know," he said.
The European Union is considering such a technique in its AI
Act, a legislation that will set the rules for AI in Europe, which is currently
being negotiated by lawmakers.
Overpopulation on Mars
Hinton's list of AI dangers contrasted with conference
discussions that were less over safety and threats, and more about seizing the
opportunity created in the wake of ChatGPT.
Venture Capitalist Sarah Guo said doom and gloom talk of AI
as an existential threat was premature and compared it to "talking about
overpopulation on Mars", quoting another AI guru, Andrew Ng.
She also warned against "regulatory capture" that
would see government intervention protect the incumbents before it had a chance
to benefit sectors such as health, education or science.
Opinions differed on whether the current generative AI
giants — mainly Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Google — would remain unmatched or
whether new actors will expand the field with their own models and innovations.
"In five years, I still imagine that if you want to go
and find the best, most accurate, most advanced general model, you're probably
going to still have to go to one of the few companies that have the capital to
do it," said Leigh Marie Braswell of venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins.
Zachary Bratun-Glennon of Gradient Ventures said he foresaw
a future where "there are going to be millions of models across a network
much like we have a network of websites today."
0 comments:
Post a Comment