Pablo Hiriart
While Mexico’s pathetic carnival of institutional destruction parades along with the betrayals in the political opposition, there are also winds blowing in the world worthy of attention.
Geoffrey Hinton, winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics and considered ‘the godfather’ of artificial intelligence, called for a halt to the development of what he is regarded as a key driver because it would escape our control and be the end of the human species as we know it.
In his opening remarks to the BBC in London last week, the British-Canadian Nobel laureate said that the further this technology advances, the more dangerous it will become against humanity, against which “it could revolt.”
Hinton’s work on neural networks gave rise to the artificial intelligence systems that have alarmed him because they allow widespread lying in social networks or the emergence of killer robots that respond to codes of conduct autonomous of human will.
His fear of his creature’s unpredictable development reminds us of the letter from German scientist Albert Einstein to U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in October 1939.
Some considered that text to have changed the course of history. American economist Alexander Sachs took it to the White House and hand-delivered it to President Roosevelt.
Einstein’s letter, which is available on Internet search engines, said that the Nazis were doing initial work to develop nuclear weapons. He asked Roosevelt that the U.S. stockpile uranium to win the race against Hitler for the atomic bomb.
After the war and the use of the bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Einstein wrote in (1947) Newsweek: “If I had known that the Germans would not succeed in making an atomic bomb, I would never have lifted a finger”.
Geoffrey Hinton replied something like this to a question from the New York Times: “I console myself with the usual excuse: if I hadn’t done it, someone else would have done it.
After winning the Nobel Prize, he said in a telephone interview with the BBC that AI “is going to be wonderful in many ways, in areas like health care.”
But, he said, “we also have to worry about some possible negative consequences. In particular, the threat of these things getting out of control.”
Last year, Hinton resigned from his job at Google “so he could talk about the dangers of artificial intelligence without considering how this affects Google,” he explained.
Two months after his departure from the tech giant, a group of scientists – Elon Musk included – published a letter to AI labs calling for a halt to developing more powerful systems, at least for six months, because of the “profound risks to human society.”
FLI_Pause-Giant-AI-Experiments_An-Open-LetterThe world, however, followed the carnival of what may be a new possibility for its self-destruction.
In last week’s BBC interview, Hinton told the BBC, “We have no experience of what it’s like to have things smarter than us… I don’t think you should extend this until you understand whether you can control it.”
The Nobel laureate said that artificial intelligence systems “are not smarter than us, but I think they soon will be.”
What will be the consequence?
“Artificial intelligence systems will not only (be) able to generate their own code, but also to run that code on their own,” said the physics Nobel, the godfather of AI.
Thus, artificial intelligence, more intelligent than humans, with autonomy, i.e., out of control, would be able to take control of our lives.
Science fiction? Not anymore.
This Hinton told the BBC:
“My guess is that five or 20 years from now, there will be a 50 percent chance that we will have to face the problem of artificial intelligence trying to take control of our lives.”
He was wrong earlier: “I thought it was a long way off, 30 to 50 years away or even more. Obviously, I don’t think that anymore.”
Unlike other dangerous experiments, the Nobel laureate said, such as nuclear weapons, in this case, there is no way of knowing whether companies or countries are working on artificial intelligence in secret.
In summary, the godfather of AI, a Nobel laureate in physics, called on the world’s leading scientists to collaborate to develop ways to control this technology.
So, let us prepare ourselves for a time when we will not know what is true and what is a lie, even if our eyes can see it.
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