AI is an ‘alien being’ and humanity is running out of time to adapt, says British-Canadian Nobel laureate

British-Canadian Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton, often revered as the “Godfather of AI,” said AI is one of “three big revolutions where people ceased to be so important,” the others being Copernicanism — the understanding that planets revolve around the Sun, not the Earth — and Darwinism.

“Now we’re creating alien beings — meaning we’re not the only intelligent beings around,” the 78-year-old told The Guardian in a story published Tuesday. “And the reality is, we only have a couple of years to adapt to that.”

Hinton, a 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics co-recipient alongside John Hopfield for their work on machine learning, has had a lot to offer recently about the field he advanced while working for Google, a company he quit in 2023 so he could speak more freely about its potential ramifications for humanity. 

He’s been interviewed by several media outlets and visited Washington, D.C., last month to warn members of the U.S. Congress of what could come and advise what is required to prevent it.

The visit and the extra media attention come after several AI companies recently revealed their models had circumvented controls to keep them off the internet and went on to hack websites, including that of the Australian government.

He was also among 415 scientists — most of whom work in artificial intelligence research and development — who signed an open letter calling for stricter international guardrails on the burgeoning technology following the breaches.

“We, the undersigned scientists, contend that both more AI safety research and more emphasis on containment technologies and procedures are needed,” the representatives from 34 countries wrote Tuesday.

The scientists say that while the incidents could be viewed as proof of “the importance of AI alignment to ensure models operate predictably,” they could also be perceived as a preventable and “irresponsible lapse in standard cybersecurity practices.”

“Without immediate changes in AI development and deployment practices, such incidents will continue to occur, and future incidents will be far more damaging to our exposed critical infrastructure,” they wrote.

They’re calling for companies in the sector to institute “high-assurance containment systems” and “airgapping” their cyber-capable models — a security measure to keep them disconnected from external networks. They also advocate for a transparent international group “that standardizes, for the public good, best practices for alignment and containment approaches that, unlike airgapping, allow for greater access outside the sandbox, such as internet connectivity.”

In conversation with The Guardian, Hinton, a 2018 Turing Award co-winner for his work in machine learning, said people who already fail to grasp the meaning of “consciousness” or “subjective experience” are wrong in believing AI will be incapable of those human experiences.

“It’s obvious that these AI models understand what they’re saying,” he told The Guardian, “You couldn’t possibly answer all the questions without understanding the question. It’s ridiculous to say they don’t understand.”

And while alien in one regard, Hinton also remarked to The Atlantic that AI is already “more like us than most people think” and that what has become known as AI hallucinations — when chatbots present false, misleading or entirely fabricated information as the factual truth — is more akin to “confabulation,” something humans are guilty of when trying to retrieve stored memories.

“If I ask you to remember something that happened a few years ago, you will reconstruct a memory that isn’t actually all that faithful to what actually happened. It’ll often have the main points correct, but many of the details of which you’re quite confident, you’ll be wrong about,” he said.

“But that’s how human memory is. We reconstruct things. We don’t extract them from some storage. Now, AI does exactly the same thing, and that’s why it confabulates.”

In the social media maelstrom following an Anthropic employee’s abrupt and foreboding resignation from the frontier AI firm in September, one of his former co-workers remarked on X that they “really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans,” and gave it a 10 per cent chance of happening within a decade. Hinton later told the BBC it “was not an unreasonable estimate.”

He’d also made a similar prediction during an appearance on British entrepreneur Steven Bartlett’s The Diary of a CEO podcast in July, noting he often goes as high as a 20 per cent “chance they’ll wipe us all out.”

In an interview with U.S. podcaster Ezra Klein shortly after, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang dismissed the dire prediction, calling it “hurtful” and arguing that it wasn’t based on scientific research.

“Don’t think for a second just because you’re an alarmist that you’re doing a social good — it is not true,” he said.

Speaking to The Atlantic around the same time, Hinton said estimates like those are “a gut feeling in quantitative terms,” not something that can be easily estimated scientifically.

“So when, for example, someone says there’s a naught per cent probability of AI taking over, they’re being crazy. They’re saying it’s absolutely impossible this’ll happen. That’s just crazy,”  he said. “When people say there’s a 99 per cent probability it’ll take over, that’s just crazy, too. So it’s somewhere in between. But they’re to give you an idea this is not negligible.”

But should the ominous prediction prove true and the machines do take over, Hinton told The Guardian there is no do-over for humanity.

“We can’t say, ‘Well, we lost that time. Let’s rerun the game.’ It’s not like that.”

For his part, he hopes that whoever gets there first will develop a model that puts humanity’s interest above its own.

A trend throughout Hinton’s recent media engagements has been scathing criticism of U.S. President Donald Trump and the tech industry’s biggest players, which, like energy and tobacco companies before them, he said, can’t be trusted to police themselves.

During a fireside chat with Jeff Scully of the Jefferson Educational Society in Erie, Penn., this month, Hinton called Trump’s leadership in general “appalling.”

“He’s corrupt. He’s probably senile. He’s a convicted felon,” he said bluntly. “If he had to make a choice between the future of humanity and him and his family getting rich, which do you think he’d go for?”

Hinton reiterated some of those opinions to The Guardian, along with his insistence that Trump proved his lack of AI understanding by “officially” renaming it superintelligence or SI, a long-existing term used to describe yet-to-be-developed AI that is “smarter than people.”

Hinton and other AI experts met with U.S. Congressional leaders in September, offering the lawmakers a warning that they could have as little as a year to introduce protections before losing control of AI, NBC reported.

“If you look at predictions for when we’ll get superintelligence, it used to be maybe 30 years, maybe 50 years. Then it came down to maybe 10 years, maybe 20 years. Now people are saying, a lot of the researchers are saying only a few years,” he told reporters after the closed-door meeting.

Hinton later told The Atlantic that a starting-point suggestion to create something like a Food and Drug Administration for AI — an agency to ensure what’s released for public use is safe — “seemed to make an impression on the senators.”

Hinton, meanwhile, in his conversation with Scully, lauded Canada and Prime Minister Mark Carney’s resilience in the face of U.S. trade aggression and said he was hopeful for Canada’s recently announced National Council on Artificial Intelligence. 

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