​The man dubbed the “godfather of artificial intelligence” has resigned from Google and is warning that artificial intelligence systems can become dangerous if they fall into the hands of people with bad intentions. He says he regrets working on some of these things and is intimidated by some of the chatbot developments. It seems that the time when these technologies will become super smart is much closer.

Geoffrey Ginton is 75 years old, born in Great Britain, and is one of the people who has done the most for the development of artificial intelligence systems, working mostly in the field of neural networks.

He worked at Google for ten years, recently resigned and explained that now that he is no longer working at the tech giant, he can speak openly about the risks posed by this rapid development of AI systems.

Hinton has spoken extensively about the dangers of AI in the New York Times and the BBC.

He says he regrets having contributed to AI, but says he finds solace in the fact that if he hadn’t, someone else would have developed those aspects anyway.

What is the danger? The more powerful the developed artificial intelligence systems become, the more dangerous they are, and in this sense we only need to look at how far these systems have developed in the last five years.

One danger is that in the future these systems will “steal” people’s workplaces in large numbers. We can complement these systems now, but soon they will have a strong impact on the labor market.

There is something else very important: it seems that the time when artificial intelligence systems will become smarter than humans is much closer.

The danger is that future versions of chatbots will “learn” unexpected things from the vast amount of data they analyze. Companies rely more and more on artificial intelligence systems in their work and make more and more important decisions, which is not good, if you take into account the fact that such systems are unpredictable.

“Few would have believed that these systems would become smarter than humans, and many said that this moment was still far away. I would say that it is in 30-50 years, but now I don’t believe it anymore.”

More and more companies are working on improving artificial intelligence systems, competition is high, and technology development will be fast. Why is this serious? Because technology can end up in the hands of people with bad intentions who will do serious things. Hinton referred to “bad actors” who could do “bad things”. Asked about an example, Hinton said that Putin could put his people to work so that these AI systems have ever-increasing influence and great freedom and do damage.

Jeffrey Hinton also explained that he concluded that these AI systems have a different intelligence than humans.

“We humans are biological systems, while others are digital systems. The big difference is that in digital systems you have many copies of the same set of weights, the same model of the world. All these children can learn individually, but share knowledge instantly. It’s like having 10,000 people and when one of them learns something, the others will automatically learn it too. This is how these chatbots learn so much more than any human.”

Hinton says Google has made the ethical choice not to release the chatbot publicly for now, but was forced to do so after the success of OpenAI and after Microsoft also integrated the chatbot into Bing. Google could not stand aside when the competition was moving decisively.

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