I don't really know a lot about this topic but when the "godfather" of AI quits his job at Google to speak out against the dangers of AI, it kind of grabs ones attention.



WASHINGTON (AP) — Sounding alarms about artificial intelligence has become a popular pastime in the ChatGPT era, taken up by high-profile figures as varied as industrialist Elon Musk, leftist intellectual Noam Chomsky and the 99-year-old retired statesman Henry Kissinger.

But it’s the concerns of insiders in the AI research community that are attracting particular attention. A pioneering researcher and the so-called “Godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton quit his role at Google so he could more freely speak about the dangers of the technology he helped create.

Over his decades-long career, Hinton’s pioneering work on deep learning and neural networks helped lay the foundation for much of the AI technology we see today.

There has been a spasm of AI introductions in recent months. San Francisco-based startup OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed company behind ChatGPT, rolled out its latest artificial intelligence model, GPT-4, in March. Other tech giants have invested in competing tools — including Google’s “Bard.”

Some of the dangers of AI chatbots are “quite scary,” Hinton told the BBC. “Right now, they’re not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell. But I think they soon may be.”

In an interview with MIT Technology Review, Hinton also pointed to “bad actors” that may use AI in ways that could have detrimental impacts on society — such as manipulating elections or instigating violence.

Hinton, 75, says he retired from Google so that he could speak openly about the potential risks as someone who no longer works for the tech giant.

“I want to talk about AI safety issues without having to worry about how it interacts with Google’s business,” he told MIT Technology Review. “As long as I’m paid by Google, I can’t do that.”

Since announcing his departure, Hinton has maintained that Google has “acted very responsibly” regarding AI. He told MIT Technology Review that there’s also “a lot of good things about Google” that he would want to talk about — but those comments would be “much more credible if I’m not at Google anymore.”

Google confirmed that Hinton had retired from his role after 10 years overseeing the Google Research team in Toronto.

Hinton declined further comment Tuesday but said he would talk more about it at a conference Wednesday.

At the heart of the debate on the state of AI is whether the primary dangers are in the future or present. On one side are hypothetical scenarios of existential risk caused by computers that supersede human intelligence. On the other are concerns about automated technology that’s already getting widely deployed by businesses and governments and can cause real-world harms.

“For good or for not, what the chatbot moment has done is made AI a national conversation and an international conversation that doesn’t only include AI experts and developers,” said Alondra Nelson, who until February led the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and its push to craft guidelines around the responsible use of AI tools.

“AI is no longer abstract, and we have this kind of opening, I think, to have a new conversation about what we want a democratic future and a non-exploitative future with technology to look like,” Nelson said in an interview last month.

A number of AI researchers have long expressed concerns about racial, gender and other forms of bias in AI systems, including text-based large language models that are trained on huge troves of human writing and can amplify discrimination that exists in society.

“We need to take a step back and really think about whose needs are being put front and center in the discussion about risks,” said Sarah Myers West, managing director of the nonprofit AI Now Institute. “The harms that are being enacted by AI systems today are really not evenly distributed. It’s very much exacerbating existing patterns of inequality.”

Hinton was one of three AI pioneers who in 2019 won the Turing Award, an honor that has become known as tech industry’s version of the Nobel Prize. The other two winners, Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, have also expressed concerns about the future of AI.

Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal, signed a petition in late March calling for tech companies to agree to a 6-month pause on developing powerful AI systems, while LeCun, a top AI scientist at Facebook parent Meta, has taken a more optimistic approach.

https://www.waff.com/2023/05/02/god...KmnL-Vxacvbe-tCxoEGNJjMsKA2owEZVD_FUpezY

I don't think "They" have a kill switch.

AI isn’t going to power anything. No electric, no AI.

The danger is letting something without a conscience make decisions for us. That’s AI or people.

Up here in dairy country AI stands for something else!

Here is what I said about this 2 years ago.

AI is already in use and here to stay, once it gets away from human control it will destroy the world, there will be no stopping it, right now there is still human watch over it, but the Algorithms are in place for "natural growth", what a way to describe this entity, one of man's worst births of new discovery next to the Cell Phone !!

Any one not believing or trying to understand its growth, is going to be left behind to a dismal life of hide and seek !!

Somebody please tell me how AI is going to fuel generators and make repairs.

Will it mine coal?

We already have AI in the White House, Sniffy and Giggles, that sure isn't real intelligence by any means.

Pretty soon robots will gang up on human kind and kill us!!!.

I think the more u understand about AI the better you can understand the risks. Right now technology( AI) works for humans but here's one thought to think about, what if humans worked for AI. Best of my knowledge AI can't come up with its own desires or motivations but if an individual or small group of individuals used it to control the world we could be in trouble. If a job working for AI payed more or provided a better live style how many would side with it? Look what Hitler got people to do and he wasn't as smart as AI by a long shot. Look how many people the Roman Empired controlled.
As far as who would mine the coal, just take a look at everything slave labor has done or build in this world. If you dont think slave labor could happen again your crazy. With everything being digital it would be much easier to enslave people today in many aspects. AI could give someone the ability to enslave (control)the general population in ways we are not thinking about. The digital world can be attacked, invaded, taken over and controlled the same as any land mass if you have superior intelligence, tactics or equipment.

It means the same out here in cow/calf country also!

A whole bunch of people with degrees and tech jobs will probably become obsolete within the next couple years due to AI.

Banks and the folks that work in them will go the way of travel agencies. Already things like Venmo and Zelle taking over that sector. What is the world going to do with all these unnecessary people?

Government jobs?

Guessing by covid they are working on that one

Unnecessary people will be deleted !!

AI gets far out there enough it won't need people, yea will be a while but it will be the same end !!

AI is not a pretend to be ok thing, it will be a big problem that starts very slow and safely, then it's over !

So what magic is going to power it continuously?

Why am I still having to charge my phone and wind my watch?

My guess that several of the world powers are developing it and using it for their own gain and potential gain. Any actions to control it is just an attempt to limit and control anyone else from using it or developing it thus giving themselves the upper hand. Once technology is developed the cats out of the bag so to speak its just a matter of who has it and controls it.

Plenty of information on the internet if you want to lean about it or it's potential though the information we have access is probably only the tip of the iceberg. Kind of like a secret weapon, by the time the general population learns about it they are already using something 2 generations better

The following reply to your comment was written 100% by AI - not kidding. No human was involved - other than to create the machines that wrote this.


You raise some important points about the potential risks associated with AI, and it's true that the more we understand about AI, the better we can mitigate those risks. While AI is currently designed to serve humans and can't come up with its own desires or motivations, it's still important to be aware of the potential for misuse by individuals or groups who may seek to control the technology for their own gain.

It's also true that history has shown us the dangers of humans being controlled by other humans, whether through slavery or oppressive regimes. With the increasing digitization of our lives, it's important to consider the potential for digital enslavement as well. AI could certainly be used to control the general population in ways we may not have even thought of yet, and it's important to be vigilant in considering the potential risks associated with this technology. Ultimately, it will be up to individuals, organizations, and governments to ensure that AI is used in a responsible and ethical manner, and that the risks associated with its use are carefully considered and addressed.