AI ‘godfather’ says universal basic income will be needed

Professor Hinton reiterated his concern that there were human extinction-level threats emerging.

Developments over the last year showed governments were unwilling to rein in military use of AI, he said, while the competition to develop products rapidly meant there was a risk tech companies wouldn’t “put enough effort into safety”.

Professor Hinton said “my guess is in between five and 20 years from now there’s a probability of half that we’ll have to confront the problem of AI trying to take over”.

This would lead to an “extinction-level threat” for humans because we could have “created a form of intelligence that is just better than biological intelligence… That’s very worrying for us”.

AI could “evolve”, he said, “to get the motivation to make more of itself” and could autonomously “develop a sub-goal of getting control”.

He said there was already evidence of large language models – a type of AI algorithm used to generate text – choosing to be deceptive.

He said recent applications of AI to generate thousands of military targets were the “thin end of the wedge”.

“What I’m most concerned about is when these can autonomously make the decision to kill people,” he said.

Professor Hinton said something similar to the Geneva Conventions – the international treaties that establish legal standards for humanitarian treatment in war – may be needed to regulate the military use of AI.

“But I don’t think that’s going to happen until after very nasty things have happened,” he added.