By:  Ilana Siyance

Artificial Intelligence is a “more urgent” threat than climate change, an early pioneer of the technology warned.

It was reported by the NY Post, on Monday that Dr. Geoffrey Hinton warned about the risks of AI, after revealing that he quit his part time job at Google’s AI development so that he can more freely speak about its risks.  “I wouldn’t like to devalue climate change. I wouldn’t like to say, ‘You shouldn’t worry about climate change.’ That’s a huge risk too.   But I think this might end up being more urgent,” Hinton said in an interview with Reuters.  “With climate change, it’s very easy to recommend what you should do: you just stop burning carbon. If you do that, eventually things will be okay. For this it’s not at all clear what you should do.”

Dr. Hinton, 75, is commonly referred to as the “Godfather of AI”.  He is credited with laying the foundations for AI systems, which over time led to the creation of ChatGPT and other programs now leading the market.  In 2018, Hinton had received the Turing Award, which is considered the computing world’s equivalent to the Nobel Prize, for his work on neural networks that was described as “major breakthroughs in artificial intelligence.”

“I’m in the camp that thinks this is an existential risk, and it’s close enough that we ought to be working very hard right now, and putting a lot of resources into figuring out what we can do about it,” Hinton said in the recent interview.

Hinton is not alone in his fears.  Numerous experts, with close knowledge into the industry, have been speaking out in concern over looming potential threats posed by unrestrained development of artificial intelligence.

Elon Musk was one of the first to speak out in March, going so far as to call for a six month pause in AI development so that proper guidelines can be implemented to regulate the industry. Some 1,000 other experts signed on in agreement, but Hinton does not support this suggestion, saying a pause would be “utterly unrealistic.”  More recently Microsoft’s top economist Michael Schwarz also spoke out about the risks.  “I am quite confident that, yes, AI will be used by bad actors, and yes, it will cause real damage and yes, we need to be very careful and very vigilant to avoid that by all means possible,” Schwarz said during a World Economic Forum event in Geneva.  “Breaking is much easier than building,” Schwarz added, even though his company is behind ChatGPT, the Open AI tool. “Before AI could take all your jobs, it could certainly do a lot of damage in the hands of spammers, people who want to manipulate elections and so on.”

As per the Post, Microsoft’s widely popular ChatGPT, which has impressed the public with its lifelike responses to random user prompts, has been criticized for allegedly sharing misinformation.  Tech rivals including Google, Meta and even Musk have been rushing to compete with their own versions of AI.  This has fueled more fears that the tech may significantly hurt the job market, with AI taking over for live agents.

Prompted to action, the Biden administration hosted a summit last week to have “frank and constructive discussion” on how to approach advancements in the new technology. Four tech leaders were invited to the White House summit including Google CEO Sundar Pichai, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.  “As I shared today with CEOs of companies at the forefront of American AI innovation, the private sector has an ethical, moral, and legal responsibility to ensure the safety and security of their products,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in a statement after the meeting.