'AI Godfather' claims Musk and WH seeking his help about 'risk of digital intelligence'

Mere days after leaving tech giant Google to warn the world about the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI), the man -- who is frequently credited as the father of AI -- will be answering pleas for assistance from Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, Twitter CEO Elon Musk, and the White House, he claims, the Guardian reported. 

Dr Geoffrey Hinton won the Turing Award, the highest accolade in computer science, in 2018 for his work on "deep learning" alongside Yann Lecun of Meta and Yoshua Bengio of the University of Montreal. Hinton's efforts to understand the human brain led him to believe that digital brains might be about to replace biological ones, and his efforts led to the development of the technology that is currently the foundation of the AI revolution.

I disagree with US' concerns over national security: Hinton

But the psychologist and computer scientist from London might not have the insights the wealthy are looking for. “The US government inevitably has a lot of concerns around national security. And I tend to disagree with them,” he told the Guardian. “For example, I’m sure that the defence department considers that the only safe hands for this stuff is the US defence department – the only group of people to actually use nuclear weapons."

"I’m a socialist,” Hinton added. “I think that private ownership of the media, and of the ‘means of computation’, is not good." Taking on Google, he said “If you view what Google is doing in the context of a capitalist system, it’s behaving as responsibly as you could expect it to do. But that doesn’t mean it’s trying to maximise utility for all people: it’s legally obliged to maximise utility for its shareholders, and that’s a very different thing.”

I'm not a policy guy, Geoffrey asserts

Since he spoke out on Monday about his concerns that the development of AI could bring about the collapse of civilisation within 20 years, Hinton has been fielding new requests for interviews every two minutes, The Guardian reported. 

However, he struggles to come up with specific advice when asked. "I'm not a policy guy," he asserts. “I’m just someone who’s suddenly become aware that there’s a danger of something really bad happening. I wish I had a nice solution, like: ‘Just stop burning carbon, and you’ll be OK.’ But I can’t see a simple solution like that.”

“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 better understand how the brain is learning things. But very recently, I decided that maybe these big models are actually much better than the brain. We need to think hard about it now, and if there’s anything we can do. The reason I’m not that optimistic is that I don’t know any examples of more intelligent things being controlled by less intelligent things."

“You need to imagine something that is more intelligent than us to the same degree that we are more intelligent than a frog. It’s all very well to say: ‘Well, don’t connect them to the internet,’ but as long as they’re talking to us, they can make us do things."

Hinton, citing the impact of Robert Mercer, a supporter of Cambridge Analytica, on political campaigns on both sides of the Atlantic, has additional worries about the rapid rise in power of AI models even outside of the existential peril.