AI Pioneer Defines It as a ‘More Urgent’ Threat to Humanity Than Climate Change
Microsoft-backed OpenAI fired the starting pistol on a technological arms race in November with the launch of ChatGPT.
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Artificial intelligence could pose a "more urgent" threat to humanity than climate change, AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton told Reuters in an interview on Friday.
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Geoffrey Hinton, widely known as one of the "godfathers of AI", recently announced he had quit Alphabet after a decade at the firm, saying he wanted to speak out on the risks of the technology without it affecting his former employer.
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Hinton's work is considered essential to the development of contemporary AI systems. In 1986, he co-authored the seminal paper "Learning representations by back-propagating errors", a milestone in the development of the neural networks undergirding AI technology. In 2018, he was awarded the Turing Award in recognition of his research breakthroughs.
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But he is now among a growing number of tech leaders publicly espousing concern about the possible threat posed by AI if machines were to achieve greater intelligence than humans and take control of the planet.
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"I wouldn't like to devalue climate change. I wouldn't like to say, 'You shouldn't worry about climate change.' That's a huge risk too," Hinton said. "But I think this might end up being more urgent."
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He added: "With climate change, it's very easy to recommend what you should do: you just stop burning carbon. If you do that, eventually things will be okay. For this it's not at all clear what you should do."