AI Can Soon Learn to Manipulate Humans: Warns Godfather of AI

Known as the godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton said that artificial intelligence can possibly learn to control humans and develop different “ways of manipulating people”

One prominent name amongst the countless voices protesting against artificial intelligence is Geoffrey Hinton, an ex-Google employee who is crowned to be the ‘Godfather of AI’. Talking about the dangers of artificial intelligence in his recent interview, Hinton said that it would control humans and possibly learn “ways of manipulating people”.

Aged 75, Hinton is both a cognitive psychologist and a computer scientist who joined Google in 2013 but has recently resigned from his position in protest of the fast-paced AI development taking place at the company.

Speaking in an interview with CNN, Hinton said that he had to “blow the whistle”, which was his resignation, to let technology developers know the dangers attached with the development of artificial intelligence.

Throughout the interview, Hinton kept mentioning how artificial intelligence is getting smarter than humans and that too on an unprecedented pace.

“I’m just a scientist who suddenly realised that these things are getting smarter than us,” said Hinton while talking in the interview.

Discussing his regrets towards contributing to the creation of artificial intelligence, Hinton said that he consoles himself with “the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have”.

Hinton warned that if AI progress continues at the same pace, we might soon create a world where we will “not be able to know what is true anymore”.

The computer scientist also discussed the countless jobs artificial intelligence will replace in the future, a recent example for which can be seen at IBM, who have paused its hiring and is expecting to equip AI for certain jobs.

Adding to his comments about AI and how it could possibly manipulate people, Hinton said that “if it (AI) gets to be much smarter than us, it will be very good at manipulation because it will have learned that from us, and there are very few examples of a more intelligent thing being controlled by a less intelligent thing”.

“It knows how to programme so it’ll figure out ways of getting around restrictions we put on it. It’ll figure out ways of manipulating people to do what it wants,” he added.

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