AI's Founding Father is Scared

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👀 Today’s Thing: AI's Founding Father is Scared

🤖 The NYTimes scared the hell out of my mom this morning with a trio of worrisome headlines about danger, mind-reading, and more danger. The lead story is about AI legend Geoffrey Hinton, “leaving Google so that he can freely share his concern that artificial intelligence could cause the world serious harm.”

🎧 Want to go deeper? Check out my podcast episode with Cade Metz, the NYTimes technology reporter who wrote today’s story on Hinton. The episode centers on Metz’ then-new book, 2021’s Genius Makers.

📖 Backstory

☞ After 50 years as a pioneer in the field, the so-called Godfather of AI is scared. From the article: “Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now,” he said of A.I. technology. “Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That’s scary.”

☞ Hinton fears that Google and Microsoft will get so locked into an AI arms race as to create dangerous technology that bad actors will use to harm society.

☞ Hinton also sang a song of cold comfort, familiar to followers of the tech world: “I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have.”

🔑 Keys to Understanding

🥇 Hinton took to Twitter to clarify that he didn’t quit his job to attack Google. That’s non-news, but in the comments below the tweet I found this darkly on the nose AI-generated beer ad.

🥈 The AI arms race is drawing comparisons to the nuclear arms race of the 1980s, which scared the hell out of me when I was a kid (and inspired a Sting song). Ironically or not, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is getting pre-release Oscar buzz for its depiction of the “Father of the Atomic Bomb.”

🥉 Hinton will be speaking this week at MIT’s EmTech Digital conference. It’ll be interesting to see if he sounds the alarm louder in his first post-retirement interview.

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Until the next thing,

- Noah

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