Geoffrey Hinton tells us why he's now scared of the tech (A.I.) he helped build

[usonian]

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/05/02/1072528/geoffrey-hinton-google-why-scared-ai/
If you're blocked for any reason: https://archive.ph/Emb2v

Worth a read. Impossible to summarize in 4 paragraphs, but here goes anyway.

I met Geoffrey Hinton at his house on a pretty street in north London just four days before the bombshell announcement that he is quitting Google. Hinton is a pioneer of deep learning who helped develop some of the most important techniques at the heart of modern artificial intelligence, but after a decade at Google, he is stepping down to focus on new concerns he now has about AI.

Hinton says that the new generation of large language models—especially GPT-4, which OpenAI released in March—has made him realize that machines are on track to be a lot smarter than he thought they’d be. And he’s scared about how that might play out.

“Look, here’s one way it could all go wrong,” he says. “We know that a lot of the people who want to use these tools are bad actors like Putin or DeSantis. They want to use them for winning wars or manipulating electorates.”

Bengio agrees with Hinton that these issues need to be addressed at a societal level as soon as possible. But he says the development of AI is accelerating faster than societies can keep up. The capabilities of this tech leap forward every few months; legislation, regulation, and international treaties take years.

My opinion: So the comparison is made to chemical weapons, which are banned (on paper), whereas A.I. is completely "without control rods" and society is (very) likely to take longer to deal with this force than the force is likely to unravel society, either via its innate disruptive power or in the hands of bad actors.

[intrepidity]

1. "Don"t look up!" nt

[usonian]

2. From the article. (movie spoiler alert)

Does Hinton really think he can get enough people in power to share his concerns? He doesn’t know. A few weeks ago, he watched the movie Don’t Look Up, in which an asteroid zips toward Earth, nobody can agree what to do about it, and everyone dies—an allegory for how the world is failing to address climate change.

“I think it’s like that with AI,” he says, and with other big intractable problems as well. “The US can’t even agree to keep assault rifles out of the hands of teenage boys,” he says.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

3. A sensible Canadian who dislikes bad actors like DeSantis and thinks lack of gun control is nuts. nt

[Scrivener7]

4. AI is the devil. It's like social media. It seems great at first, and then it starts

to tear up society.

AI will do that a lot faster, and a lot more effectively, and a lot more violently.

[Javaman]

5. When AI starts feeding off of social media

all bets are off to try and control it or regulate it. it will know way to much about society to be controlled.