For decades, Geoffrey Hinton worked to make machines learn. Today, he’s the first to call for caution.
The 78-year-old British-Canadian computer scientist and Nobel laureate, known as the “godfather of AI”, believes artificial intelligence is already “conscious”. According to LADbible, he warns that humans would do well to ensure it “truly cares about us” or else “we’re doomed”.
It’s not the first time he’s sounded the alarm. In 2023, he left Google because, he said, AI was becoming “pretty scary”. That year, he told the BBC he was concerned about the existential risk of what happens when these things become more intelligent than us. And he illustrated it with an image: an AI is like 10.000 people, where, when one learns something, they all know it instantly.
With that logic, he says, it’s no surprise that chatbots know far more than any person. The idea that machines are conscious is his opinion, not a scientifically proven fact. But when the person saying it helped invent the technology, can you ignore it?