Artificial intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton said in an interview with Reuters on Friday that artificial intelligence could pose a "more urgent threat to humanity" than climate change.
Hinton, widely known as one of the "godfather of artificial intelligence," recently announced that he was leaving Alphabet after a decade at it, saying he wanted to speak out about the technology's dangers without affecting the company he left.
In 1986, Hinton co-authored the seminal paper Learning Representations by Backpropagation Errors, a milestone in the development of neural networks that underpin AI technology. In 2018, he was awarded the Turing Prize for his research achievements.
But now he is among a growing number of technology leaders publicly expressing concern about the potential threat posed by artificial intelligence greater than humans and the threat to control of the planet.
"I don't want to underestimate climate change, and I'm not saying you don't have to worry about it, that's a big risk too... but I think AI could become more urgent," Hinton said.
"With climate change it's very easy to recommend what we should do, if we stop burning carbon then things will eventually be OK. But with AI it's not at all clear what we should do," he added.
Microsoft-backed OpenAI blew the "starting whistle" to what many considered a "technological arms race" last November, when it made publicly available its ChatGPT chatbot. ) powered by artificial intelligence, and quickly became the fastest growing app in history, reaching 100 million monthly users in two months.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk joined thousands in signing an open letter calling for a 6-month halt to AI development.
The letter's signatories include the CEO of Stability, researchers at Alphabet-owned DeepMind, and fellow AI pioneers Joshua Bengio and Stuart Russell.
Hinton shares the signatories' concern that artificial intelligence could pose an existential threat to humanity, but he disagrees with pausing research, calling it "totally unrealistic".
"I'm from a camp that thinks this is an existential threat, and it's close enough that we have to work really hard now, but we have to put a lot of resources into seeing what we can do about it," he said.
A committee of European Union lawmakers responded to the letter, which Musk supports, and called on US President Joe Biden to hold a global summit on the future direction of technology with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
Last week, the committee approved a set of proposals targeting generative AI that would force companies like OpenAI to disclose any copyright material used to train their models.
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