Guardian: One of the “godfathers of AI”, Geoffrey Hinton, has said it could turn out that humans would have been better off never developing the technology as he warned it could trigger a large-scale incident this year or next, such as a temporary blackout of financial or power systems.
The Nobel prize-winning computer scientist said that within a decade and possibly sooner, humanity will know whether it can manage the technology’s risks and enable what he called “radical abundance” or whether “we fail to manage the risks and … have a huge gap between rich and poor, huge cultural problems, massive unemployment, just society being torn apart”.
“Either later this year or next year we’ll see Chornobyl, and that may be enough to make people really pay attention,” he said.
This Chornobyl-type of event would not be a nuclear incident, according to the examples he gave, but rather could include an AI-enabled attack on the electricity-generating system that “causes a massive brownout” or an incident that brings down the financial system for a week.
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“Can you imagine what would happen? We could recover from it [but] that would make them sit up and take notice.”
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