It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when ...

Emergence/Luna Style

Why this pix? Well, one could easily see this as a sunset and not as a full moon revealing itself thru the cloud layer, something akin to how we perceive the emergence of AI, the open-ended tech, able to become the stuff of nightmares if we let it. Yours truly has been writing about AI for years, not fear mongering or fan boying but rather preferring to take a cautious approach to this astounding technology as we will never know how it works, ever, a condition most disquieting to this writer. With this in mind, Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of AI, has similar misgivings because there is no certitude, a fact proven to be true time and time again by Quantum Mechanics, the start point for all things related to computation and reality.

To whit ...

According to Hinton, he told Google he was leaving last month, which wouldn't have been long after his interview with CBS in which he warned that we were at a "pivotal moment" for AI.

For the most part, Hinton considered Google a "proper steward" of AI until last year. Things took a turn for the worse when Microsoft, which has invested billions into OpenAI, released its Bing AI search engine powered by GPT-4, a potential direct threat to Google's dominance in search technology. Google, in turn, is now rushing to develop an AI integrated search of its own.

In addition to its threat to people's jobs, Hinton worries that this heating up AI arms race will lead to an internet so flooded by fake images and text that no one will "be able to know what is true anymore" — a threat that he considers immediate.

Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay

The real clincher, though, is that Hinton thinks that the day that AI gets smarter than humans and starts augmenting itself may dawn on us sooner than we think.

"The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that," Hinton remarked.

"But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off," he continued. "I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that."

It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when ...

To be continued ... 

Dr. Geoffrey Hinton is leaving Google so that he can freely share his concern that artificial intelligence could cause the world serious harm.Credit...Chloe Ellingson for The New York Times

Dr. Hinton’s journey from A.I. groundbreaker to doomsayer marks a remarkable moment for the technology industry at perhaps its most important inflection point in decades. Industry leaders believe the new A.I. systems could be as important as the introduction of the web browser in the early 1990s and could lead to breakthroughs in areas ranging from drug research to education.

But gnawing at many industry insiders is a fear that they are releasing something dangerous into the wild. Generative A.I. can already be a tool for misinformation. Soon, it could be a risk to jobs. Somewhere down the line, tech’s biggest worriers say, it could be a risk to humanity.