AI systems may develop the desire to seize control from humans as a way of accomplishing other preprogrammed goals, said Geoffrey Hinton, a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto.

“I think we have to take the possibility seriously that if they get smarter than us, which seems quite likely, and they have goals of their own, which seems quite likely, they may well develop the goal of taking control,” Hinton said during a June 28 talk at the Collision tech conference in Toronto, Canada.

“If they do that, we’re in trouble.”

Hinton has been dubbed one of the “godfathers of AI” for his work in neural networks. He recently spent a decade helping to develop AI systems for Google but left the company last month, saying he needed to be able to warn people of the risks posed by AI.

While Hinton does not believe that AI will innately crave power, he said that it could nevertheless seek to seize it from humans as a logical step to better allow itself to achieve its goals.

“At a very general level, if you’ve got something that’s a lot smarter than you, that’s very good at manipulating people, at a very general level, are you confident that people stay in charge?” Hinton said.

“I think they’ll derive [the motive to seize control] as a way of achieving other goals.”

AI Now Capable of Reason

Hinton previously doubted that an AI superintelligence that could match humans would emerge within the next 30 to 50 years. He now believes it could come in less than 20.

In part, he said, that is because AI systems that use large language models are beginning to show the capacity to reason, and he is not sure how they are doing it.

“It’s the big language models that are getting close, and I don’t really understand why they can do it, but they can do little bits of reasoning.

“They still can’t match us, but they’re getting close.”

Hinton described an AI system that had been given a puzzle in which it had to plan how to paint several rooms of a house. It was given three colors to choose from, with one color that faded to another over time, and asked to paint a certain number of rooms in a particular color within a set time frame. Rather than merely opting to paint the rooms the desired color, the AI determined not to paint any that it knew would fade to the desired color anyway, electing to save resources though it had not been programmed to do so.

“That’s thinking,” Hinton said.

To that end, Hinton said that there was no reason to suspect that AI wouldn’t reach and exceed human intelligence in the coming years.

“We’re just a big neural net, and there’s no reason why an artificial neural net shouldn’t be able to do everything we can do,” Hinton said.

“We’re entering a period of huge uncertainty. Nobody really knows what’s going to happen.”

War Robots Will Destabilize the World

AI may not even need to reach superintelligence to pose an existential risk to humanity, however.

Hinton said that militaries worldwide are creating AI-enabled robots for war that could either seek to take control to fulfill their programmed missions or would disrupt the political order by encouraging increased conflict.

“Lethal autonomous weapons, they deserve a lot of our thought,” Hinton said.

“Even if the AI isn’t superintelligent, if the defense departments use it for making battle robots, it’s going to be very nasty, scary stuff.”

Foremost among those nations seeking to develop lethal AI are none other than the world’s two largest military powers, China and the United States.

China’s communist regime is developing AI-enabled lethal systems and investing in AI capabilities related to military decision-making and command and control.

The United States, meanwhile, is preparing for a world in which national armies are primarily composed of robots, which top brass expects to occur in less than 15 years.

“We know they’re going to make battle robots,” Hinton said. “They’re busy doing that in many different defense departments. So [the robots are] not necessarily going to be good since their primary purpose is going to be to kill people.”

Moreover, Hinton suggested that unleashing AI-enabled lethal autonomous systems would fundamentally change the structure of geopolitics by dramatically reducing the political and human cost of war for those nations that could afford such systems.

“Even if it’s not superintelligent, and even if it doesn’t have its own intentions. … It’s going to make it much easier, for example, for rich countries to invade poor countries,” Hinton said.

“At present, there’s a barrier to invading poor countries willy-nilly, which is you get dead citizens coming home. If they’re just dead battle robots, that’s just great. The military-industrial complex would love that.”

To that end, Hinton said that governments should try to incentivize more research into how to safeguard humanity from AI. Simply put, he said, many people are working to improve AI, but very few are making it safer.

Better yet, he said, would be establishing international rules to ban or govern AI weapons systems the way the Geneva Protocol did for chemical warfare after World War I.

“Something like a Geneva Convention would be great, but those never happen until after they’ve been used,” Hinton said.

Whatever course of action governments take or don’t take concerning AI, Hinton said that people needed to be aware of the threat posed by what is being created.

“I think it’s important that people understand it’s not just science fiction, it’s not just fear-mongering,” Hinton said. “It is a real risk that we need to think about, and we need to figure out in advance how to deal with it.”

Since all politicians are “bad actors,” (if they were “good” they wouldn’t be members of the ruling class to begin with) we could be looking at a tyranny most of us have only imagined or seen in movies.

• Governance By Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Unaccountable Tyranny

Turing Award-winning scientist Geoffrey Hinton resigned from Google last month, where he had spent much of the past decade developing generative AI programs. Hinton is credited with being a foundational figure in the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) but told the New York Times in a lengthy interview published on Monday that he took the decision to exit amid a de-facto arms race in Silicon Valley between Google and Microsoft, according to reporting by RT.

He has also since warned of the risks that his life’s work may present to humanity in the very near future.

The controversial technology has formed the basis for generative AI software such as ChatGPT and Google Bard, as the tech-sector giants test acceptance by the slave class into a new scientific frontier, one they expect to form the basis of their companies’ futures and wipe out the need for the human slave class.

• Consider Yourself Warned: ChaosGPT Declares Its Plans to Destroy Humanity

Hinton’s told the New York Times his motivation for leaving Google was so he could speak without oversight about the technology that he now views as posing a danger to mankind. “I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” he told the United States newspaper.

The latest version of ChatGPT, released in March by San Francisco’s OpenAI, prompted the publication of an open letter signed by more than 1,000 tech-sector leaders – including Elon Musk – to highlight the “profound risks to society and humanity” that the technology poses.

Hinton maintains that Google has acted “very responsibly” in its stewardship of artificial intelligence but eventually, he says, the technology’s proprietors might inevitably lose control. This could lead to a scenario, he says, where false information, photos and videos are indeterminable from real information, and lead to people not knowing “what is true anymore.”  –RT

We are already there without the help of AI, thanks to the ruling class’s propaganda machine and psychological operations. The slave class can barely get by and function from day to day anymore, let alone have time to actually think critically and figure out what is true in the fakest world humans have ever experienced.

“The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people – a few people believed that,” Hinton told the New York Times. “But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.”

• Father Of Artificial Intelligence: ‘Singularity Is Less Than 30 Years Away’

We’ve been warned repeatedly and no matter how bad it is, humans keep trusting their masters to look out for them.

• WEF Transhumanists Will Fail Because of Free Will

Article cross-posted from SHTF Plan.