by C. Mitchell Shaw, The New American:
In 2012, Dr. Geoffrey Hinton and two of his students at the University of Toronto made breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) that laid the foundation for where AI is today and where it is going in the future. This week, he quit his job at Google so that he has the freedom to openly speak against his creation.
Hinton shares the honorary title “Godfather of AI” with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, because of their work on deep learning that led to AI as we know it. He also shares the 2018 Turing Award with those men because of the breakthroughs they made in fields related to AI.
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But Dr. Hinton also shares some similarities with Dr. Victor Frankenstein — the young scientist character created by English novelist Mary Shelley in her famous 1918 novel. Both Hinton and Frankenstein set out to break new ground. And both wound up creating what they later realized to be monsters they could not control. But where Frankenstein’s monster eventually seeks to destroy itself, AI is duplicating at an alarming rate and must be stopped by man, since it will not — in fact, can not — stop itself.
After his work at the University of Toronto, Hinton went to work for Google, where he continued to build upon his previous successes. Now, more than 10 years later, he has weighed his life’s work in the balance and found it wanting.
As The New York Times reported earlier this week:
Geoffrey Hinton was an artificial intelligence pioneer. In 2012, Dr. Hinton and two of his graduate students at the University of Toronto created technology that became the intellectual foundation for the A.I. systems that the tech industry’s biggest companies believe is a key to their future.
On Monday, however, he officially joined a growing chorus of critics who say those companies are racing toward danger with their aggressive campaign to create products based on generative artificial intelligence, the technology that powers popular chatbots like ChatGPT.
Dr. Hinton said he has quit his job at Google, where he has worked for more than a decade and became one of the most respected voices in the field, so he can freely speak out about the risks of A.I. A part of him, he said, now regrets his life’s work.
While AI apologists of all stripes claim that AI will revolutionize the world for the better (even comparing it to the creation of web browsers) and promise that it will lead to breakthroughs in medicine, crime prevention, poverty, psychology, and even death, Hinton and others who have been in the AI trenches for years (in Hinton’s case, since the beginning of any practicable form of AI) warn that humanity is prying the lid off of Pandora’s box. “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” Dr. Hinton told the Times.
Indeed.
Hinton seems to have arrived — albeit a little late — to the same conclusion as others who have issued concerned warnings about AI. In fact, while his departure from Google is admirable in its own right, since he quit his job to set himself free to warn the world of the monster he helped create, he does remind this writer of a scene from the original Jurassic Park film. In that scene, one of the scientists who has helped clone extinct dinosaurs says that perhaps he and others have spent so much energy trying to figure out whether they could that they never stopped to think about whether they should.
This is that.
Almost as if to illustrate that point, the Times article states:
Gnawing at many industry insiders is a fear that they are releasing something dangerous into the wild. Generative A.I. can already be a tool for misinformation. Soon, it could be a risk to jobs. Somewhere down the line, tech’s biggest worriers say, it could be a risk to humanity.
This comes a month after this magazine issued the same warning in almost the same words, and that article was far from the first warning The New American has issued. Following the insight of tech insiders, it is not difficult to predict that AI allowed to run free is the precursor to AI run amok. And AI run amok may make Frankenstein’s monster look positively cuddly by comparison.
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