The British Geoffrey Hinton, one of the great pioneers in the development of artificial intelligence (IA), has quit his job at Google to be able to warn more freely of the dangers posed by these new technologiesas he said in an interview published Monday by The New York Times.
Often called the “godfather” of AI, Hinton said that at 75 he now regrets spending his career in this field. “I console myself with the normal excuse: if it hadn’t been me, someone else would have done it,” he told the New York newspaper.
His voice of alarm adds to the warnings that other experts have made in recent months, especially as a result of the launch of new text bots such as the popular ChatGPT and the big bets that the technological giants are making in this area.
“It’s hard to see how you can stop bad actors from using it for bad things”Hinton said in the interview, in which he warns about the excessive speed at which progress is being made.
“Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now,” he said. “Take the difference and spread it forward. That’s scary,” said Hinton, who last year received the Princess of Asturias Award for Scientific and Technical Research along with three other AI pioneers for his work.
Chat GPT
In the short term, this expert fears above all that the internet will be flooded with false texts, photos and videos, and that citizens may not be able to distinguish what is real, but he also believes that these technologies can replace many workers and, later, even pose a threat to humanity.
“The idea that these things could actually become smarter than people, some people believed.”he explained. “But most people thought it was too far away. I thought it was too far. I thought it was between 30 and 50 years away or even more. Obviously, I don’t think that anymore.”he added.
In your opinion, work in this area should be halted until it is well understood whether it will be possible to control AIan idea in line with other public appeals from personalities in the technology sector who have requested temporarily suspend experiments.
Through Twitter, Hinton wanted to point out later that he is not leaving Google to be able to criticize the company, but to be able to talk about the dangers of artificial intelligence without having to worry about the impact that those opinions would cause in the company where he worked, a company that according to him “has acted very responsibly”. EFE
