World

Artificial Intelligence Pioneer Leaves Google and Warns About Technology’s Future

The “godfather of AI” is issuing a warning about the technology he helped create. Geoffrey Hinton, a trailblazer in artificial intelligence, has joined the growing list of experts sharing their concerns about the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence. The renowned computer scientist recently left his job at Google to speak openly about his worries about the technology and where he sees it going. 

“It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” Hinton said in an interview with The New York Times. Hinton is worried that future versions of the technology pose a real threat to humanity.

Hinton, 75, is most noted for the rapid development of deep learning, which uses mathematical structures called neural networks to pull patterns from massive sets of data. Like other experts, he believes the race between Big Tech to develop more powerful AI will only escalate into a global race. Hinton tweeted Monday morning that he felt Google had acted responsibly in its development of AI, but that he had to leave the company to speak out.

Hinton is a notable addition to a group of technologists that have been speaking out publicly about the unbridled development and release of AI. An open letter from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, which was signed by 19 current and former leaders of academic society, was released last month warning the public of the risks around AI and the need for collaboration to mitigate some of those concerns.

Hinton, along with scientists Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, won the Turing Award in 2019, known as the tech industry’s version of the Nobel Prize, for their advancements in AI. Hinton, Bengio and LeCun were open about their concerns with AI but were optimistic about the potential of the technology, including detecting health risks earlier than doctors and more accurate weather warnings about earthquakes and floods.

Comments

Source
NBC News

Related Articles

Back to top button