Hinton, a warning that should attract attention

 

Elon Musk warning about the dangers of AI, and calling for a six month pause in its development can be easily dismissed, after all he threatened to launch his own 'truth' anti-GPT4. Even, with all due respect, can the calls of the Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak. But when Dr Hinton, 'the godfather of AI' highlights the dangers of AI, his work in the field deserves respect, and subsequently so do the warnings he provides. 

Hinton's research investigates ways of using neural networks for machine learning, memory, perception, and symbol processing. He has authored or co-authored more than 200 peer reviewed publications. 

Hinton has claimed that Google had previously acted as a steward of AI development, carefully testing its work before launching a product into the public domain. Due to Microsoft's involvement with Open AI, and the subsequent launch of a GPT agent into its Edge browser, Google have launched Bard as it's early foray into the field. It won't be the last product it launches this year. 

In 2021 Google announced it's development of MUM, which it described as 'A new AI milestone for understanding information' 

MUM not only understands language, but also generates it. It’s trained across 75 different languages and many different tasks at once, allowing it to develop a more comprehensive understanding of information and world knowledge than previous models. And MUM is multimodal, so it understands information across text and images and, in the future, can expand to more modalities like video and audio.

From it's position as a leader in generative AI Google has suddenly found it was playing second fiddle to Microsoft. Hinton has stated as companies improve their AI systems, he believes, they become increasingly dangerous. “Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now,”. “Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That’s scary.” 

Hinton, quite rightly, has warned about the dangers of the misinformation / propaganda inherent in the generative tools, as have been repeatedly mentioned in this blog, he states the average person will “not be able to know what is true anymore.”

Indeed, elections will never be the same again.

In the interview Hinton warns about the dangers of AI to the job market, there are various estimates from the likes of PwC about this. By the mid 2030's most predictions state that between 30% to 50% of all jobs will be affected if not lost. 

Considering a future beyond this, Hinton, a long time advocate against the military development of AI said: “The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that,”  “But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.”

This needs to be understood in the light of Google's (and others) robot developments:

Given the totally inadequate governmental responses to legislation as a means of ensuring AI safety, which as even Bard said of the UK's white paper are, 'too slow and too bureaucratic' then the public conversation is acutely necessary.