Imagine Dr. Frankenstein building his monster. Then, right as the lightning strikes, he turns to the camera and says: "Actually, guys? This might have been a bad idea. I'm retiring. Good luck!"
That is essentially what Geoffrey Hinton did.
The Man Who Built the Brain
Hinton is a legend. He kept neural networks alive when everyone else said they were a dead end. He won the Turing Award (the Nobel Prize of computing). He worked at Google Brain.
Then, at age 75, he quit. Not to play golf. To warn us that AI might kill us all.
The Fear
His worry isn't "AI will take our jobs." His worry is "AI will become smarter than us, and we have no idea how to control something smarter than us."
It’s a valid point. Do ants control humans? No. We step on them. We don't hate ants. We just build highways where their anthills are.
Hinton thinks we might be the ants.
The Complexity
The irony is that he helped build the highway. He created the backpropagation algorithms that trained the models that are now scaring him.
(Narrator: It's like Oppenheimer, but for chatbots.)
Conclusion
I want to be optimistic. I want to believe AI will cure cancer and write my unit tests.
But when the guy who invented the technology says "Be afraid," I listen.
I'm just going to be really nice to ChatGPT from now on. "Please" and "Thank you." Just in case.
