Geoffrey Hinton, the computer scientist widely regarded as the “Godfather of AI,” has said he is “very sad” about what his life’s work has become, warning that artificial intelligence is growing dangerously powerful while the world fails to take its risks seriously, telling BBC Newsnight in an interview released Tuesday, “It makes me very sad that I put my life into developing this stuff and that it’s now extremely dangerous and people aren’t taking the dangers seriously enough,” as he cautioned that AI could cause mass job losses, social unrest and eventually outsmart humans, adding that humanity is approaching an unprecedented moment where machines more intelligent than people may soon emerge, saying, “We’ve never been in this situation before of being able to produce things more intelligent than ourselves,” and warning that shutting down such systems may not be possible because “The idea that you could just turn it off won’t work,” while stressing that the biggest mistake now would be failing to invest in research on how humans can coexist with advanced systems, warning, “If we create them so they don’t care about us, they will probably wipe us out,” even as he said catastrophic outcomes are not inevitable and depend on how AI is designed and governed, expressed concern that weakening global cooperation and rising authoritarianism make regulation harder, compared AI governance to nuclear and chemical weapons agreements, and insisted he would not undo his work because “It would have been developed without me,” while still voicing hope that AI could improve education and medicine, but stressing urgency, saying, “We’re at a very crucial point in history when we’re going to develop things more intelligent than ourselves fairly soon… It’s crucial we do that research.”
