The cryptocurrency industry has been widely affected by the development of artificial intelligence technology. More specifically, the growing polarity of AI-based chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google Bard has created a subsection of cryptocurrencies themed around the field.
There are many coins in the market that have seen exponential growth due to the rising interest in AI.
We also tap ChatGPT on many topics, such as:
And while it’s exciting to chat with an AI on topics you’d normally discuss with your colleagues, there’s another side to it, and Geoffrey Hinton speaks about it loud and clear.
The Godfather of Artificial Intelligence
Geoffrey Hinton is a British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist born in 1947 in Wimbledon, London.
He is known for his work on artificial neural networks and is a former employee of Google. He left the company in May 2023 in a big public exit, citing public concerns about the risks of artificial intelligence (AI) technology.
Hinton was the first winner of the Rumelhart Prize in 2001 and is internationally renowned for his work on artificial neural nets, particularly how they can be designed to learn without the need for a human teacher. He also won the 2018 ACM AM Turing Award for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs in the field.
He is also often referred to as one of the godfathers of AI. And now, he has worries.
We’ve Discovered The Secret To Immortality, But There’s A Catch
In an interview for The Guardian, Hinton made it clear that he left Google on good terms and had no objections to what the company did or had done.
In the article, he compares biological intelligence (the human brain) to digital intelligence, outlining the inefficiencies that humans face. He says that our brain is running at low power, but our system is inefficient in terms of transferring information. Digital intelligence, on the other hand, is different.
You pay a big cost in terms of energy, but if one of them learns something, they all know it, and you can easily save more copies. So the good news is, we have discovered the secret of immortality. The bad news is, it’s not for us.
In essence, Hinton concluded that humans have built intelligence that has the potential to surpass human thought.
I thought it would happen eventually, but we have a lot of time: 30 to 50 years. I don’t think about that anymore. And I don’t know of any examples of highly intelligent objects being controlled by less intelligent objects.
To better understand the comparison, the computer scientist pits us (humans) against the frogs while also adding:
And it (AI) can learn from the web, it can read every book written on how to manipulate people, and it has also seen it in practice.
Fear of the People
Citing a recent report by Hinton, the reports outline the potential dangers of so-called superintelligence.
The Godfather of AI outlines scenarios where an AI may seek to control multiple aspects of its own environment in the pursuit of solving complex problems. These aspects even include human manipulation. The scientist believes that AI will not even need a clear goal of achieving power or destruction to use its ability to imitate human behavior.
It’s not all doom and gloom, though. He believes that there are ways to reduce catastrophic scenarios, but he also believes that we have passed the point of no return and stopping the progress of AI is impossible, nor should it be stopped.
I think we should continue to develop it because it can do amazing things. But we must make a concerted effort to mitigate or prevent possible negative consequences.
How close are we to those bad consequences? Closer than you think.
I have great uncertainty now. It is possible that the big language models, having exhausted all the documents on the web, will not be able to continue unless they also get access to all our private data. I don’t want to dismiss things like that – I think people who are confident in this situation are crazy.
The right way to think about the odds of a disaster is closer to a simple coin toss than we might like. “
Concluding Thoughts
Artificial Intelligence is likely to play an increasing role in our lives. In fact, according to ChatGPT (oh, the irony) itself, some of the fields it will affect in the next 7 years include:
- Healthcare
- Automation
- transportation
- education
- Smart Homes
- Customer Service
Since voicing his concerns, Hinton has been criticized by many for not following some of his colleagues who quit earlier. It’s easy to come to that conclusion, but it’s also easy to overlook the complexity of the problem, which draws on many technological, philosophical, and ethical principles.
I think all Hinton is trying to say is that AI’s impact on humanity, for better or for worse, is probably closer than most of us think.
Featured image courtesy of CBC, submitted to them by Geoffrey Hinton.
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