Who is Hinton? The godfather of AI, winner of the Turing Prize, left Google earlier this year due to the potential “existential threat” that AI presents to the human species. Single most quoted expert on GAI in the world, period. Not a guy who has been educated by sci-fi movies. He is not blindly following Skynet here….
Why is Hinton scared? According to the ten-page New Yorker interview (November 20, 2023 issue): unlike human brains, which die when the carcass dies, digital intelligence can be used on many other computers simultaneously and forever. Thousands of neural networks “can learn ten thousand different things at the same time, then share what they’ve learned.” As digital learning combines immortality and infinite replicability, “we should be concerned about digital intelligence taking over from biological intelligence.”
Hinton thinks machines do “think” like people. Like people, computers work by analogy with a sprinkling of reason on top. In the next decade AI will overcome its current difficulties with “physical intuition,” which is part of animals but not wholly a matter of intelligence (example: a cat with limited intelligence can still jump on a series of pieces of furniture and a machine cannot cause that happen–yet.) Then AI’s skill set will be complete.
Hinton fears that the human drive for control will cause a dictator to deploy an autonomous lethal weapon. And worse yet, since machines that are human-like will themselves crave more control by following neural paths similar to humans, “…how do you prevent them [computers] from ever wanting to take control? And nobody knows the answer.”
Lots of people with lots of technical skill are out in the marketplace, running the race to get their country or their company to a point of technical superiority. Along comes “THE” expert in all of this, and he sounds like a screen-writer for James Cameron.
Let’s talk movies:
When John Badham filmed War Games (incredibly, 40 years ago), the WHOPPER computer, which had started the ultimate world war just because it could, at the last minute stepped back and started a game of tic-tac-toe, observing that the only way to win the thermo-nuclear war game was “not to play.” When Cameron did Terminator, his autonomous weapons system did not stop. When Kubrick filmed Dr. Strangelove, the Russian autonomous weapons system did not stop. Hinton is telling us that Badham wrote a fairy tale in War Games–that real GAI would not stop.
Yes, I “researched” this blog post in New Yorker magazine and in sci-fi movies. But that is not what the godfather of GAI did–is it?