gems, AI, artificial intellegence, pyschology, income inequality, OpenAI, Sam Altman

Geoffrey Everest Hinton, a seminal figure in the development of artificial intelligence, painted a frightening picture of the technology he helped create on Wednesday in his first public appearance since stunning the scientific community with his abrupt about face on the threat posed by AI. “The alarm bell I’m ringing has to do with the existential threat of them taking control,” Hinton said Wednesday, referring to powerful AI systems and speaking by video at EmTech Digital 2023, a conference hosted by the magazine MIT Technology Review. “I used to think it was a long way off, but I now think it's serious and fairly close.” Hinton has lived at the outer reaches of machine learning research since an aborted attempt at a carpentry career a half century ago. After that brief dogleg, he came back into line with his illustrious ancestors, George Boole, the father of Boolean logic and George Everest, British surveyor general of India and eponym of the world's tallest mountain. Together with colleagues, Yoshua Bengio, and Yann LeCun, with whom he shared the 2018 Turing award, he developed a kind of artificial intelligence based on multi-layer neural networks, connected computer algorithms that mimicked information processing in the brain. That technology, which Hinton dubbed ‘deep learning,’ is transforming the global economy – but it’s success now haunts him because of its potential to surpass human intelligence.