[Godfather of AI Geoffrey Hinton recently quit Google warning of
the dangers of artificial intelligence. ‘We’ve discovered the
secret of immortality. The bad news is it’s not for us.’]
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WHY THE GODFATHER OF AI FEARS FOR HUMANITY  
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Alex Hern
May 5, 2023
Guardian
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_ 'Godfather of AI' Geoffrey Hinton recently quit Google warning of
the dangers of artificial intelligence. ‘We’ve discovered the
secret of immortality. The bad news is it’s not for us.’ _

Geoffrey Hinton at UBC, by Eviatar Bach (CC BY-SA 3.0)

 

The first thing Geoffrey Hinton says when we start talking, and the
last thing he repeats before I turn off my recorder, is that he left
Google, his employer of the past decade
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on good terms. “I have no objection to what Google has done or is
doing, but obviously the media would love to spin me as ‘a
disgruntled Google employee’. It’s not like that.”

It’s an important clarification to make, because it’s easy to
conclude the opposite. After all, when most people calmly describe
their former employer as being one of a small group of companies
charting a course that is alarmingly likely to wipe out humanity
itself, they do so with a sense of opprobrium. But to listen to
Hinton, we’re about to sleepwalk towards an existential threat to
civilisation without anyone involved acting maliciously at all.

Known as one of three “godfathers of AI”
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in 2018 Hinton won the ACM Turing award – the Nobel prize of
computer scientists for his work on “deep learning”. A cognitive
psychologist and computer scientist by training, he wasn’t motivated
by a desire to radically improve technology: instead, it was to
understand more about ourselves.

[Dr Geoffrey Hinton, the ‘godfather of AI’, has left Google]
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‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton quits Google and warns over
dangers of misinformation
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Read more
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“For the last 50 years, I’ve been trying to make computer models
that can learn stuff a bit like the way the brain learns it, in order
to understand better how the brain is learning things,” he tells me
when we meet in his sister’s house in north London, where he is
staying (he usually resides in Canada). Looming slightly over me –
he prefers to talk standing up, he says – the tone is uncannily
reminiscent of a university tutorial, as the 75-year-old former
professor explains his research history, and how it has inescapably
led him to the conclusion that we may be doomed.

In trying to model how the human brain works, Hinton found himself one
of the leaders in the field of “neural networking”, an approach to
building computer systems that can learn from data and experience.
Until recently, neural nets were a curiosity, requiring vast computer
power to perform simple tasks worse than other approaches. But in the
last decade, as the availability of processing power and vast datasets
has exploded, the approach Hinton pioneered has ended up at the centre
of a technological revolution.

“In trying to think about how the brain could implement the
algorithm behind all these models, I decided that maybe it can’t –
and maybe these big models are actually much better than the brain,”
he says.

A “biological intelligence” such as ours, he says, has advantages.
It runs at low power, “just 30 watts, even when you’re
thinking”, and “every brain is a bit different”. That means we
learn by mimicking others. But that approach is “very inefficient”
in terms of information transfer. Digital intelligences, by contrast,
have an enormous advantage: it’s trivial to share information
between multiple copies. “You pay an enormous cost in terms of
energy, but when one of them learns something, all of them know it,
and you can easily store more copies. So the good news is, we’ve
discovered the secret of immortality. The bad news is, it’s not for
us.”

Once he accepted that we were building intelligences with the
potential to outthink humanity, the more alarming conclusions
followed. “I thought it would happen eventually, but we had plenty
of time: 30 to 50 years. I don’t think that any more. And I don’t
know any examples of more intelligent things being controlled by less
intelligent things – at least, not since Biden got elected.

“You need to imagine something more intelligent than us by the same
difference that we’re more intelligent than a frog. And it’s going
to learn from the web, it’s going to have read every single book
that’s every been written on how to manipulate people, and also seen
it in practice.”

I’ve been shaken by the realisation that digital intelligence is
probably much better than biological intelligence

He now thinks the crunch time will come in the next five to 20 years,
he says. “But I wouldn’t rule out a year or two. And I still
wouldn’t rule out 100 years – it’s just that my confidence that
this wasn’t coming for quite a while has been shaken by the
realisation that biological intelligence and digital intelligence are
very different, and digital intelligence is probably much better.”

There’s still hope, of sorts, that AI’s potential could prove to
be over-stated. “I’ve got huge uncertainty at present. It is
possible that large language models,” the technology that underpins
systems such as ChatGPT
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“having consumed all the documents on the web, won’t be able to go
much further unless they can get access to all our private data as
well. I don’t want to rule things like that out – I think people
who are confident in this situation are crazy.” Nonetheless, he
says, the right way to think about the odds of disaster is closer to a
simple coin toss than we might like.

This development, he argues, is an unavoidable consequence of
technology under capitalism. “It’s not that Google’s been bad.
In fact, Google [[link removed]] is
the leader in this research, the core technical breakthroughs that
underlie this wave came from Google, and it decided not to release
them directly to the public. Google was worried about all the things
we worry about, it has a good reputation and doesn’t want to mess it
up. And I think that was a fair, responsible decision. But the problem
is, in a capitalist system, if your competitor then does do that,
there’s nothing you can do but do the same.”

He decided to quit his job at Google, he has said
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reasons. One was simply his age: at 75, he’s “not as good at the
technical stuff as I used to be, and it’s very annoying not being as
good as you used to be. So I decided it was time to retire from doing
real work.” But rather than remain in a nicely remunerated
ceremonial position, he felt it was important to cut ties entirely,
because, “if you’re employed by a company, there’s inevitable
self-censorship. If I’m employed by Google, I need to keep thinking,
‘How is this going to impact Google’s business?’ And the other
reason is that there’s actually a lot of good things I’d like to
say about Google, and they’re more credible if I’m not at
Google.”

Since going public about his fears, Hinton has come under fire
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not following some of his colleagues in quitting earlier. In 2020,
Timnit Gebru, the technical co-lead of Google’s ethical AI team,
was fired by the company
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a dispute over a research paper spiralled into a wide-ranging clash
over the company’s diversity and inclusion policies. A letter signed
by more than 1,200 Google staffers opposed the firing, saying it
“heralds danger for people working for ethical and just AI across
Google”.

But there is a split within the AI faction over which risks are more
pressing. “We are in a time of great uncertainty,” Hinton says,
“and it might well be that it would be best not to talk about the
existential risks at all so as not to distract from these other things
[such as issues of AI ethics and justice]. But then, what if because
we didn’t talk about it, it happens?” Simply focusing on the
short-term use of AI, to solve the ethical and justice issues present
in the technology today, won’t necessarily improve humanity’s
chances of survival at large, he says.

I’m just someone who’s suddenly become aware that there’s a
danger of something really bad happening

Not that he knows what will. “I’m not a policy guy. I’m just
someone who’s suddenly become aware that there’s a danger of
something really bad happening. I want all the best brains who know
about AI – not just philosophers, politicians and policy wonks but
people who actually understand the details of what’s happening –
to think hard about these issues. And many of them are, but I think
it’s something we need to focus on.”

Since he first spoke out on Monday, he’s been turning down requests
from the world’s media at a rate of one every two minutes (he agreed
to meet with the Guardian, he said, because he has been a reader for
the past 60 years, since he switched from the Daily Worker in the
60s). “I have three people who currently want to talk to me
– Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer and Elon Musk. Oh, and the White
House.
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putting them all off until I have a bit more time. I thought when I
retired I’d have plenty of time to myself.”

Throughout our conversation, his lightly jovial tone of voice is
somewhat at odds with the message of doom and destruction he’s
delivering. I ask him if he has any reason for hope. “Quite often,
people seem to come out of situations that appeared hopeless, and be
OK. Like, nuclear weapons: the cold war with these powerful weapons
seemed like a very bad situation. Another example would be the ‘Year
2000’ problem. It was nothing like this existential risk, but the
fact that people saw it ahead of time and made a big fuss about it
meant that people overreacted, which was a lot better than
under-reacting.

“The reason it was never a problem is because people actually sorted
it out before it happened.”

_Alex Hern [[link removed]] is the UK
technology editor for the Guardian. Twitter @alexhern
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* artificial intelligence
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* Geoffrey Hinton
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* Science
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