AI has the potential to one day take over from humanity, Godfather of AI Geoffrey Hinton warned

Geoffrey Hinton believes AI will bring increased productivity and efficiency 
Geoffrey Hinton worries the potential risk that people could lose their jobs to artificial intelligence
Geoffrey Hinton is concerned about AI-powered fake news, autonomous battlefield robots

The Godfather of Artificial Intelligence Geoffrey Hinton opens up about promises, threats and expectations about AI from governments,companies and developers to carefully consider the best ways to safely advance the technology.

What Is Artificial Intelligence?

The theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.

Why hinton is worried about Artificial Intelligence?

Geoffrey Hinton says AI has the potential to one day take over from humanity.I’m not saying it will happen.If we could stop them ever wanting to, that would be great, but it’s not clear we can stop them ever wanting to.

Hinton believes AI has the potential for good and harm. He said now is the moment to run experiments to understand AI and pass laws to ensure the technology is ethically used.

“It may be we look back and see this as a kind of turning point when humanity had to make the decision about whether to develop these things further and what to do to protect themselves if they did,” Hinton said.

“I don’t know. I think my main message is there’s enormous uncertainty about what’s gonna happen next. These things do understand. And because they understand, we need to think hard about what’s going to happen next. And we just don’t know.”

Hinton also worries about AI-powered fake news, how a biased AI could harm people searching for jobs, law enforcement’s use of the technology and autonomous battlefield robots.

“You should definitely have quite a lot of awe and you should have a little tiny bit of dread, because it’s best to be careful with things like this,” Hinton said.

Human intelligence VS Artificial Intelligence

Hinton said he believes AI systems will eventually have self-awareness and consciousness.

“I think we’re moving into a period when, for the first time ever, we may have things more intelligent than us,” he said.

AI may already be better at learning than the human mind, Hinton said. Currently, the biggest chatbots have about a trillion connections, but the human brain has about 100 trillion.

And yet, in the trillion connections in a chatbot, it knows far more than you do in your hundred trillion connections, which suggests it’s got a much better way of getting knowledge into those connections,” Hinton said.

AI systems are already writing computer code.“One of the ways in which these systems might escape control is by writing their own computer code to modify themselves,” Hinton said. “And that’s something we need to seriously worry about.”

Geoffrey Hinton is a British computer scientist and cognitive psychologist, best known for his work on artificial neural networks — aka the framework for AI. He spent a decade working for Google before leaving in May of this year, citing concerns about the risks of AI.