“Very sad.”
That’s how Geoffrey Hinton, the computer scientist widely known as the “Godfather of AI,” describes how he feels about the technology he helped create and what he says is the world’s failure to take its growing risks seriously.
“It makes me very sad that I put my life into developing this stuff and that it’s now extremely dangerous and people aren’t taking the dangers seriously enough,” Hinton told BBC Newsnight in an interview released on Tuesday and recorded earlier this month.
Hinton, who helped pioneer the neural networks that underpin modern artificial intelligence, has become one of the field’s most outspoken critics as AI systems grow more powerful and widespread.
He has predicted that AI could trigger widespread job losses, fuel social unrest, and eventually outsmart humans — and has said that researchers should focus more on how advanced systems are trained, including ensuring they are designed to protect human interests.
On BBC Newsnight, Hinton said that humanity is approaching a pivotal moment as researchers edge closer to building machines more intelligent than humans.
“We’ve never been in this situation before of being able to produce things more intelligent than ourselves,” Hinton said, adding that many experts believe that AI will surpass human intelligence within the next 20 years — and in many areas, already has. Once that happens, he said, controlling such systems may become far more difficult than many assume.
“The idea that you could just turn it off won’t work,” Hinton said, adding that a sufficiently advanced AI could persuade humans not to shut it down.
Hinton said the biggest mistake humanity could make now would be failing to invest in research on how humans can coexist with the intelligent systems they created.
“If we create them so they don’t care about us,” he warned, “they will probably wipe us out.”
He suggested that catastrophic outcomes are not inevitable, saying that the risks depend on how advanced systems are designed and governed and that humans still have “a lot of options on how to create them” while AI remains under development.
Why regulating AI may be harder than ever
Still, Hinton also expressed concern that AI is being unleashed at a time when global cooperation is weakening and authoritarian politics are on the rise, making meaningful regulation harder to achieve.
He compared the need for AI governance to international agreements on chemical and nuclear weapons.
Despite his concerns, Hinton said he would not undo his work on AI.
“It would have been developed without me,” he said. “I don’t think I made any decisions that I wouldn’t make the same way if I had the same knowledge.”
He remains hopeful about AI’s potential to improve education and medicine, pointing to AI tutors and advances in medical imaging as examples of its promise. But for now, Hinton said, urgency is paramount.
“We’re at a very crucial point in history when we’re going to develop things more intelligent than ourselves fairly soon,” he said. “We haven’t done the research to figure out if we can peacefully coexist with them. It’s crucial we do that research.”
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