Another warning from the AI ​​pioneer: It’s a ‘more urgent’ problem than climate change!

Geoffrey Hinton, one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, said in an interview with Reuters that artificial intelligence (AI) could pose a “more urgent” threat to humanity than climate change. Geoffrey Hinton, widely known as one of the “fathers of artificial intelligence”, recently left Google, where he worked for a decade, to talk about the risks of the technology.

More urgent than climate change

Hinton’s work is considered crucial to the development of contemporary artificial intelligence systems. Hinton, who wrote the seminal article “Learning representations with back propagation errors” in 1986, which marked a turning point in the development of neural networks that form the basis of artificial intelligence technology, was awarded the Turing Award in 2018.

Although Hinton is a pioneer of contemporary artificial intelligence systems, he is now one of the technology leaders who has publicly expressed his concerns about the possible threat AI will pose. And what they say seems to indicate the extent of the risk: “I don’t want to devalue climate change. I don’t mean to say, ‘You shouldn’t worry about climate change.’ That’s a big risk too, but I think AI could become more of an emergency.”

“We don’t know what to do”

Hinton points to a point that is undesirable to be accepted in his statements. According to Hinton, we know what you need to do about climate change: stop carbon production. However, according to Hinton, it is not clear what to do about artificial intelligence.

ChatGPT, which became the fastest growing application in history in a short time, reached 100 million monthly users in two months. Having deep partnership with OpenAI behind ChatGPT, Microsoft ignited an arms race in the field of AI. Hinton says the AI ​​work needs to continue, but we need to be quick about the measures as well: “I’m in the camp that thinks this is an existential risk, that we have to work very hard right now and devote a lot of resources to figuring out what we can do about it.” Currently, both the USA and the EU are working on artificial intelligence law and are preparing to introduce a comprehensive regulation.