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Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize-winning AI/ML pioneer widely known as the ‘Godfather of AI’, has warned that the AI race could make tech billionaires like Elon Musk vastly richer even as millions of workers stand to lose their jobs in automation.
While acknowledging that AI could do “tremendous good” in education and healthcare, Hinton said, “The reason it’s bad is because of the way society’s organized. So that Musk will get richer and a lot of people get unemployed and Musk won’t care. I’m using Musk as a sort of stand-in. That’s not on AI, that’s on how we organize society.”
“I believe that to make money (from AI), you’re going to have to replace human labour,” he added.
The Nobel laureate made these remarks in a recent interview on Bloomberg Television’s Wall St Week programme, where he warned about various issues including various job losses due to AI and loss of control of AI systems.
“My worry is that the obvious way to make money out of it, apart from charging fees to use the chatbots, is by replacing jobs. The way you make a company more profitable is to replace the workers with something cheaper. And I think that’s a big part of what’s driving it,” Hinton said.
“Also, if you got unemployed because you used to do ditches, you could get a job in a call center. But now those jobs are all going to go. It’s not clear where those people go. Some economists say these big changes always create new jobs. It’s not clear to me that this will, and I think the big companies are betting on it causing massive job replacement by AI because that’s where the big money is going to be,” he further said.
Hinton’s remarks come even as AI-fueled job cuts ripple across the tech industry, with Amazon most recently announcing that it will cut at least 14,000 corporate jobs. Though many big tech companies have declined to provide specific reasons for job reductions, tech leaders and experts are increasingly citing AI as a key factor in hiring freezes and headcount reductions.
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Though Hinton is known as one of the world’s leading AI research scientists, his past prediction about AI replacing radiologists has not yet come true. “People should stop training radiologists now,” Hinton had said nine years ago. However, a recent study by the American College of Radiology showed that the radiology workforce would continue to grow through 2055.
Instead of taking their jobs, AI is complementing radiologists by helping them sharpen images, automate routine tasks, identify medical abnormalities and predict disease, as per a New York Times report published in May this year.
When questioned about the massive capital being poured by tech giants into developing AI, Hinton said, “These are big companies run by serious people and presumably they wouldn’t be putting all that money in unless they thought they could get a return on it.”
“There’s some ego involved. they want to be the ones to do it first, even if it’s going to kill us all,” he added. “There’s one piece of good news, which is all the different countries are aligned in not wanting AI to take over from people (…) On AI taking over, they will collaborate because nobody wants that. The Chinese Communist Party doesn’t want AI to take over. Trump doesn’t want AI to take over. They can collaborate on that,” he said.
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The Nobel laureate also believes that advanced AI systems and human beings can co-exist with the right model. “I believe we need to look around and say, is there any model where a less-intelligent thing controls a more intelligent thing? And we have one model of that and it’s a model we all know, which is a baby controlling a mother,” he said.
“Evolution has put lots of work into allowing the baby to control the mother. And the mother is actually often more concerned about the baby than about herself. That seems a much more plausible model of how to coexist with super intelligence. But we have to accept that we’re the babies and they’re the mothers,” Hinton said.
On the AI race at the global level, Hinton opined that the US is still ahead of China but not by much. “In China, you’ve got a very large number of very competitive, very smart people, very well educated in science and engineering and math. They’re educating far more people than the US in those areas.”
“The US has basically relied on immigrants to be smart at those things. China may well overtake the US. And if there’s one thing you would do to ensure that China overtakes the US, you would stop the funding of basic research in the US and you would attack the good research universities. Trump looks like he works for Putin but actually he’s acting as if he’s working for Xi,” Hinton remarked.
