Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, often referred to as the Godfather of AI , announced that he will be responding to requests for help from Bernie Sanders, Elon Musk, and the White House, just days after resigning from Google to warn the world about the risks of digital intelligence.
In 2018, Hinton won computer science’s highest honor, the Turing award, for his work on “deep learning”, alongside Yann Lecun from Meta and Yoshua Bengio from the University of Montreal.
Dr. Geoffrey Hinton’s efforts to understand the human brain led to the development of deep learning technology, which now underpins the AI revolution. He believes that digital brains may soon surpass biological ones.
But the London-born psychologist and computer scientist might not offer the advice the powerful want to hear.
“The US government inevitably has a lot of concerns around national security. And I tend to disagree with them,” he told the Guardian. “For example, I’m sure that the defense department considers that the only safe hands for this stuff is the US defense department – the only group of people to actually use nuclear weapons.
“I’m a socialist,” Hinton added. In addition he said “I think that private ownership of the media, and of the ‘means of computation’, is not good.
“If you view what Google is doing in the context of a capitalist system, it’s behaving as responsibly as you could expect it to do. But that doesn’t mean it’s trying to maximise utility for all people: it’s legally obliged to maximise utility for its shareholders, and that’s a very different thing.”
Hinton has been fielding a new request to talk every two minutes since he spoke out on Monday about his fears that AI progress could lead to the end ofcivilisationwithin 20 years.