AI Could Pose 'More Urgent' Threat Than Climate Change, Pioneer Says

AI has seen an explosion in popularity, largely because of image-generation programs like Midjourney and Dall-E, text-generation apps like ChatGPT and ever more convincing deepfake programs like FaceSwap.

AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton recently admitted that artificial intelligence may pose a “more urgent” threat than climate change, urging the world to take the technology's effect on the public more seriously.

Hinton, who recently quit Google’s parent company Alphabet after a decade with the company, said during an exclusive interview with Reuters on Friday that while climate change is a big threat to humanity, AI could be more pressing than even that.

“I wouldn't like to devalue climate change. I wouldn't like to say, 'You shouldn't worry about climate change.' That's a huge risk too,” Hinton said. “But I think [AI] might end up being more urgent.”

Tech and thought leaders the world over have been warning that if and when AI becomes smarter than humans, it could have disastrous consequences.

Humans have long thought of themselves as the smartest organism on the planet, which has allowed us to dominate the planet in a way no other species has before. But experts wonder what will happen when we are usurped in that category with AI. There is no way to know what the desires, motivations and tactics such an entity would have and use.

In 1986, Hinton co-authored a research paper, titled “Learning Representations by Back-Propagating Errors,” where he laid out principles essential to modern-day machine learning neural networks. In 2018, he received the Turing Award for his research, the most prestigious award in computer science and computing machinery.

Hinton joins a growing number of thought and technology leaders who are warning about the potential dangers of a hyper-intelligent AI. In April, thousands of people including Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and AI pioneers Yoshua Hengio and Stuart Russell, signed a letter calling for a six-month pause on the development of more powerful AI systems.

Notably, Hinton was not a signatory on the letter. While he shares their fears about the potential risks of AI, he does not think a pause is realistic in the evermore competitive world of AI.

“It’s utterly unrealistic,” Hinton said. “I'm in the camp that thinks this is an existential risk, and it’s close enough that we ought to be working very hard right now, and putting a lot of resources into figuring out what we can do about it.”

Meanwhile, the European Union has called for a global summit discussing AI. Last week, US Vice President Kamala Harris, who had just been named the “AI czar” in the Biden administration, held talks with AI company leaders, including Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

However, companies like Microsoft and Alphabet are not the only entities pushing progress in AI. Last week, a leaked document from a Google engineer showed that some in the company are worried open-source technologies would soon surpass Alphabet and Microsoft’s efforts.