AI could ‘take control’ and ‘make us irrelevant’ as it advances, Nobel Prize winner warns

Geoffrey Hinton, a British-Canadian professor at the University of Toronto, won the Nobel Prize in physics at the beginning of the month for work on artificial neural networks.

A University of Toronto professor and Nobel Prize winner, often referred to as the “Godfather of AI,” is warning that the technology could develop and “make us irrelevant” without significant research into how to control it.

Geoffrey Hinton, a British-Canadian professor at the University of Toronto, won the Nobel Prize in physics at the beginning of the month along with Princeton University researcher John Hopfield for work on machine learning and artificial neural networks.

Speaking to Global News in a rare interview this week after winning the prestigious international award, Hinton pointed to the positives AI can bring but warned its rapid evolution could be existentially problematic.

“I’m most concerned about the long-term dangers because those are the ones that people think are maybe just science fiction,” he said.

“So, the biggest long-term danger is that, once these artificial intelligences get smarter than we are, they will take control –they’ll make us irrelevant. And that’s quite worrying; and nobody knows how to prevent that for sure, so we need to do lots of research on that right now.”

Hinton’s joint prize was for work using physical to “design artificial neural networks that function as associative memories and find patterns in large data sets,” according to a member of the Nobel committee.

Discoveries Hinton worked on are now used to advance physics in areas like facial recognition and language translation, according to the committee member.

Hinton, who left Google so he could speak more openly about the dangers artificial intelligence poses, said health care was a key area where artificial intelligence can be a huge help.