White House sought my help, disagree with US government's concerns: Godfather of AI

Dr Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of AI, said that US Senator Bernie Sanders, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, and the White House are among those who sought his help regarding artificial intelligence.

The computer scientist, however, told The Guardian that the US government might not like what he has to say. He said that the White House has concerns about national security but he disagrees with those. "For example, I’m sure that the defence department considers that the only safe hands for this stuff are the US defence department – the only group of people to actually use nuclear weapons."

He highlighted the manipulation power AI is giving authoritarian governments in destroying truth. Hinton said that this technology is a danger at a time when Americans cannot even design better gun control laws.

He added that he is a socialist and thinks that private ownership of media and means of computation is not good.

The London-born psychologist asserted that Google is being as responsible as possible but the tech giant also has an obligation to do what is best for shareholders. "If you view what Google is doing in the context of a capitalist system, it’s behaving as responsibly as you could expect it to do. But that doesn’t mean it’s trying to maximise utility for all people: it’s legally obliged to maximise utility for its shareholders, and that’s a very different thing."

The 75-year-old academician recently quit Google to speak freely about the dangers of artificial intelligence. He is also known as the godfather of AI because his work on deep learning is now underprinting the AI revolution. His work was focused on understanding the human brain and he later became convinced that digital brains might be able to supersede biological ones.

"For the last 50 years, I’ve been trying to make computer models that can learn stuff a bit like the way the brain learns it, in order to better understand how the brain is learning things. But very recently, I decided that maybe these big models are actually much better than the brain," he told The Guardian.

After he announced his resignation and plans for the future on Monday, he has been getting many requests to have a conversation.

Hinton said that he fears that the progress of AI can lead to the end of civilisation in 20 years. At the same time, he has no concrete advice to offer on how to deal with the AI revolution.

"I’m not a policy guy. I’m just someone who’s suddenly become aware that there’s a danger of something really bad happening. I wish I had a nice solution, like: ‘Just stop burning carbon, and you’ll be OK.’ But I can’t see a simple solution like that," said the former Google executive.

"We need to think hard about it now, and if there’s anything we can do. The reason I’m not that optimistic is that I don’t know any examples of more intelligent things being controlled by less intelligent things. You need to imagine something that is more intelligent than us to the same degree that we are more intelligent than a frog. It’s all very well to say: ‘Well, don’t connect them to the internet,’ but as long as they’re talking to us, they can make us do things," he added.