Hinton, who worked at Google until last year, said that while AI would increase productivity and wealth, the money would go to the rich “and not the people whose jobs will be lost and that will be very bad for society.”
He stressed that the government will have to establish a universal basic incomewhich means that the government will have to pay all individuals a fixed base salary, regardless of their means.
“I was consulted by people in Downing Street and told them that universal basic income was a good idea,” Hinton, who left Google to speak more freely about the dangers of AI, told the BBC unregulated.
Hinton worries about “emerging threats of extinction”
Hinton previously said some of the dangers of AI chatbots were “pretty scary.” He believes that AI chatbots can become smarter than humans and be exploited by “bad actors”.
AI could “evolve to gain the motivation to do more of itself” and can autonomously “develop a subgoal of taking control”, pointing to evidence that large language models choose to be misleading.
Hinton is against the use of AI technology in the military
“I think within five to 20 years, there’s a half chance that we’ll have to deal with the problem of AI trying to take over,” he said.
According to Hinton, this will result in a “threat of extinction” for humans, as they may have “created a form of intelligence that is simply better than biological intelligence…It’s very worrying for us.”
“What worries me the most is when they can autonomously make the decision to kill people,” he added.
