// PC GAMER — GAMING
'AI godfather' worries we're creating 'alien beings' with artificial intelligence, with pesky moral implications
"We should care as much about all the other aspects of a being as you do about its intelligence."
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.
Geoffrey Hinton is a computer scientist known for his foundational work in AI, specifically when it comes to neural networks (ie, approaching machine-learning a bit like our fleshy brain-learning). As such, he's been described as the 'AI godfather'. But, perhaps surprisingly, he recently described AI as "alien beings" that humans have a "moral obligation" towards.
"We’re creating alien beings—meaning we’re not the only intelligent beings around," He said in a recent interview with The Guardian, "And the reality is, we only have a couple of years to adapt to that.”
Hinton claims, "AI models understand what they’re saying. You couldn’t possibly answer all the questions without understanding the question. It’s ridiculous to say they don’t understand.”
Now, far be it for me to argue with an expert in the field, but I feel like 'understanding' is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. For just one thing, I'm not sure an 'answer' consisting of what is statistically most likely to follow a prompted question is really 'understanding.' In other words, I don't have a Nobel Prize laureate like Hinton does, but I am at least familiar with the Chinese Room thought experiment.
Hinton also says, "The reality is, we’re making beings of a different kind. And the big tech companies keep saying: we want it smarter. This is crazy. We should care as much about all the other aspects of a being as you do about its intelligence.”
AI regulation and 'alignment' (ie, training AI to have the same goals and values as humans) have been hot button issues lately. For instance, the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident is not yet a small dot in the rearview mirror, and the president of Microsoft claims that a carton of milk is more regulated than AI.
Hinton cut his ties to Google in 2023 in order to "freely speak out about the risks of AI," and he's sceptical about the AI industry's attempts to self-regulate. He quips, "Do we think tobacco companies should have been allowed to design the warnings on the packets? So that they could print them in a six-point font, in dark grey on black?"
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.