The story of how Geoffrey Hinton became “the godfather of AI” has reached mythic status in the tech world.
While he was at the University of Toronto, Hinton pioneered the neural network research that would become the backbone of modern AI. (One of his students, Ilya Sutskever, went on to be one of OpenAI’s most influential scientific minds.) In 2013, Hinton left the academy and went to work for Google, eventually winning both a Turing Award and a Nobel Prize.
I think it’s fair to say that artificial intelligence as we know it, may not exist without Geoffrey Hinton.
But Hinton may be even more famous for what he did next. In 2023, he left Google and began a campaign to convince governments, corporations and citizens that his life’s work – this thing he helped build – might lead to our collective extinction. And that moment may be closer than we think, because Hinton believes AI may already be conscious.
But even though his warnings are getting more dire by the day, the AI industry is only getting bigger, and most governments, including Canada’s, seem reluctant to get in the way.
So I wanted to ask Hinton: If we keep going down this path, what will become of us?
Mentioned:
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: The Case Against Superintelligent AI, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares
Agentic Misalignment: How LLMs could be insider threats, by Anthropic
Machines Like Us is produced by Mitchell Stuart. Our theme song is by Chris Kelly. Video editing by Emily Graves. Our executive producer is James Milward. Special thanks to Angela Pacienza and the team at The Globe and Mail.
Support for Machines Like Us is provided by CIFAR and the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University.
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