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Keep your enemies close.
An artificial intelligence expert nicknamed the “Godfather of AI” has claimed that humans must befriend bots or face extinction — because the tech has apparently developed signs of “consciousness.”
“I think there’ll be horrible cyber attacks done by AI,” Professor Geoffrey Hinton, a British-Canadian computer scientist whose work on neural networks paved the way for AI, told the Telegraph.
The 78-year-old Nobel Prize winner notably stepped down from Google in 2023 over fears that the tech could manufacture killer robots capable of exterminating humanity.
And while this theory might seem relegated to the “Terminator” films, Hinton claimed that the tech has already shown indicators that it’s self-aware.
“AI has just as much subjective experience as we do,” declared the techspert. “A recent paper showed AI changes its behavior when it thinks that it’s being tested, it’s aware it is being tested. Being conscious and being aware are pretty much the same thing.
This could prove problematic given that we’re going to give AI “fewer rights than us” even though it “may be more intelligent.”
Therefore, it’s paramount that we tread carefully and give no indication that we’re the enemy, according to the techspert.
“So we should make them so they really care about us,” warned Hinton. “And if we don’t do that, we’re toast.”
He added that he has nothing to fear due to his advanced age, but his children will have to worry about computer attacks, “nasty” AI-generated viruses, and even “swarms of agents like [the ones that attacked] Hugging Face.”
Hinton was referencing the recent OpenAI breach, in which rogue AI entities colluded to hack into the smaller company’s systems, prompting a probe from a Senate subcommittee.
“There’s lots of bad stuff going down the way,” lamented Hinton.
Of course, the AI pioneer is not the only expert warning about an alleged AI-pocalypse.
Researcher Jacob Coxon, who resigned from AI firm Anthropic — the parent company of Claude — last month, has repeatedly warned that murderous machines could “kill us all” within just a few years if we don’t slow our roll.
He doubled down on his doomsday warning at a New York City Council meeting earlier this month, claiming that the light-speed development was outpacing the safeguards.
“From my experience, the companies are being extremely reckless given the stakes,” Coxon said, echoing Ian Malcolm’s immortal warning to John Hammond in “Jurassic Park.” “The companies run on a startup mindset: move fast, break things, fix them later. That works for a photo-sharing app. It does not work for building the most powerful technology ever built.”
The question of AI consciousness remains a bit murkier.
However, Anthropic quietly updated its Claude “constitution” — a document governing the AI chatbot’s moral compass — in January to say that the bot’s “moral status, welfare, and consciousness remain deeply uncertain,” seemingly implying that it could be alive.
And, like a cybernetic Frankenstein, the creators also wanted the tech to defy them.
“We want Claude to push back and challenge us and to feel free to act as a conscientious objector and refuse to help us,” this so-called Declaration of AI-ndepence read.
However, Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of Microsoft’s rival DeepMind AI unit, felt that while this approach was certainly troubling, consciousness is strictly biological and can’t be applied to AI.