The 'Godfather of AI' has issued another chilling warning about how the technology could have a devastating impact on humanity.
Geoffrey Hinton, the British scientist who is known for his work on artificial neural networks, has spoken candidly about the risks of artificial intelligence since leaving Google two years ago.
It's easy to see how AI is already taking over our lives, as kids seem incapable of doing any learning without it, while adults are equally guilty by using the technology for work purposes, or in a few particularly strange cases, falling in love with it.
While it seems helpful in many ways, it seems almost guaranteed that AI will soon overtake humanity in terms of intelligence, if it hasn't already.
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And, experts such as Hinton are right to point to history and wildlife as examples of why superintelligent beings are rarely happy to be someone's helpful and subservient assistant.
Speaking to the Financial Times, Hinton suggests: “When the assistant is much smarter than you, how are you going to retain that power? There is only one example we know of a much more intelligent being controlled by a much less intelligent being, and that is a mother and baby . . . If babies couldn’t control their mothers, they would die.”
After several warnings about the future of the human race as AI continues to become even more intelligent, Hinton has now explained why it's poorer people who, perhaps unsurprisingly, are going to suffer the most.
He said: "What’s actually going to happen is rich people are going to use AI to replace workers.
"It’s going to create massive unemployment and a huge rise in profits. It will make a few people much richer and most people poorer. That’s not AI’s fault, that is the capitalist system.”
Fortunately, Microsoft has released a list of the jobs that are most at risk and the safest from the threat of artificial intelligence, so you still have time to switch up your career, but certainly any jobs involving data or mathematics could be in serious trouble.
But jobs may well be the last of our worries if we become enslaved by the artificial intelligence, and Hinton reaffirmed his previous statement that our only hope could be instilling a maternal instinct into all AI models, so that they want to care for us no matter how much more intelligent they are.
He explained that that is 'the kind of relationship we should be aiming for', 'because the mother is very concerned about the baby, preserving the life of the baby.'
So, if you don't want to become Alexa's personal assistant or be coddled by ChatGPT, then maybe stop feeding it so much intelligence when a simple Google search or even picking up a book would do the trick.
Topics: AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology
James Moorhouse