Geoffrey Hinton dubbed the “Godfather of AI” has bowed out from his position at Google and expressed fears about future progress in the field of neural networks, noting that it was "quite scary," media reports say.
Dr. Hinton regrets his life work and says that soon neural networks will become smarter than people. The problem is that businesses allow robots not only to generate computer code, but also to run this code on their own. He is afraid that soon AI will become completely self-sustainable and autonomous from humans. As a matter of fact, neural networks form a sort of hive mind – they “share their knowledge instantly” – what knows one robot is also known to the rest. That’s why it is no way the human brain will be able to compete with an artificial one.
Another issue is the intention of a user. How he puts it, “it is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” obviously referring to politicians who may use AI for personal gain.
He shared his anxieties about working on potentially dangerous technology and calmed himself by paraphrasing Robert Oppenheimer: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.”
However, now this self-help technique is clearly not working anymore since he plans to actively campaign to restrain AI because it poses "profound risks to society and humanity.”
Dr. Hinton started as a specialist in cognitive psychology, but soon switched to computer sciences, though, never forgetting what he learned at his Alma Mater. It can be alleged that such unique combinations of skills allowed him to come up with the idea of the now known neural network in 1972. A neural network is a self-learning mathematical model that develops by analyzing new information. Many scientists were quite skeptical about his ideas at first, but history proved them wrong.
In 2012, Geoffrey Hinton, along with his students Ilya Sutskever and Alex Krishevsky, created a neural network, capable of analyzing and identifying images. In other words, it could tell the difference between a flower and a dog, or a dog and a human. This project drew the attention of Google executives, and the tech giant bought Hinton’s start-up for $44 million, integrating it into the Google Brain project.
Dr. Hinton’s ideas became the foundation for the development of current cutting-edge AI technologies like ChatGPT or Google Bard. In 2018, he received the Turing Award for his pioneering work in neural networks.