The world is adopting artificial intelligence (AI) at a faster pace with each passing day. Different industries, sectors and people are going for the easy and profitable way out to increase productivity with less workforce to take care of. And somewhere it is leading to what everyone is fearing subconsciously – unemployment, and the godfather of has seconded the thought. Geoffrey Hinton, computer scientist and Nobel laureate, has flagged the risk of mass unemployment due to AI in future.
Not only this, he has also stressed on the availability of such information to everyone, questioning how it would look to the world when a person on the street would be able to make a “nuclear bomb”. In an interview to FT, the Nobel laureate highlighted the risks that AI, something he dedicated his life to, has for people.
AI to replace workers, warns Hinton
Hinton has been warning the world about AI. While he backs the technology for the benefit of mankind, he adds that there is another side of the story.
The AI researcher said that in the coming days, rich people will be using AI on a larger scale, and this will impact the workforce. “What’s actually going to happen is rich people are going to use AI to replace workers. It’s going to create massive unemployment and a huge rise in profits,” he added, quoted FT.
“It will make a few people much richer and most people poorer. That’s not AI’s fault, that is the capitalist system,” he warned.
Hinton said he missed the graduate students in college whom he would bombard with ideas and questions because “they are young and they understand things faster”. Now, he said, he consults ChatGPT instead, the report mentioned.
A nuclear bomb threat because of AI
The world of information that AI opens for people, is what Hinton called scary. He said a normal person would soon be able to make bioweapons using a few queries with the AI.
“A normal person assisted by AI will soon be able to build bioweapons and that is terrible. Imagine if an average person in the street could make a nuclear bomb,” he told FT. However, he added, the AI chatbots are remarkable and “extremely useful”.
About Geoffrey Hinton
Geoffrey Hinton was born in 1947 to an entomologist father and a school teacher mother in Wimbledon, in south-west London. He pursued experimental psychology for his undergraduate degree at King’s College, Cambridge. He later turned to computer science in the early 1970s.
Hinton went on to study neural networks despite their being disregarded and dismissed by the computer science community until the 2010s.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize for “foundational discoveries and inventions” in the mid-1980s that enabled “machine learning with artificial neural networks”.