4 dangers that most worry AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Geoffrey Hinton, an award-winning computer scientist known as the “godfather of artificial intelligence,” is having some serious second thoughts about the fruits of his labors.

Hinton helped pioneer AI technologies critical to a new generation of highly capable chatbots such as ChatGPT. But in recent interviews, he says that he recently resigned a high-profile job at Google specifically to share his concerns that unchecked AI development could pose danger to humanity.

“I have suddenly switched my views on whether these things are going to be more intelligent than us," he said in an interview with MIT Technology Review. "I think they're very close to it now and they will be much more intelligent than us in the future.... How do we survive that?”

Hinton is not alone in his concerns. Shortly after the Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI released its latest AI model called GPT-4 in March, more than 1,000 researchers and technologists signed a letter calling for a six-month pause on AI development because, they said, it poses “profound risks to society and humanity.”

Here's a look at Hinton's biggest concerns about the future of AI ... and humanity.

Our human brains can solve calculus equations, drive cars and keep track of the characters in “Succession” thanks to their native talent for organizing and storing information and reasoning out solutions to thorny problems. The roughly 86 billion neurons packed into our skulls — and, more important, the 100 trillion connections those neurons forge among themselves — make that possible.

By contrast, the technology underlying ChatGPT features between 500 billion and a trillion connections, Hinton said in the interview. While that would seem to put it at a major disadvantage relative to us,