Geoffrey Hinton Warns Current A.I. May Soon
Grow Past Its ‘Cute Tiger Cub’ Phase
Geoffrey Hinton, an acclaimed computer scientist often dubbed the “Godfather of A.I.” for his pioneering work on artificial neural networks, helped lay the foundation for today’s artificial intelligence revolution. But now, the technology he once championed has become a source of deep concern.
“My opinion is we’re in the situation of someone who has a very cute tiger cub,” said Hinton while speaking at the AI for Good Summit in Geneva, Switzerland, yesterday (July 9). “It’s cuddly and it’s cute and it’s wonderful to watch it play, but you better worry a lot about what happens when it grows up.”
Existential threat of AI
In 2018, Hinton, along with fellow A.I. pioneers Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, received the Turing Award, often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing.” Last year, he took home an actual Nobel Prize in Physics, which he shared with Princeton University’s John Hopfield. A British-Canadian researcher, Hinton is currently a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto and spent ten years at Google before stepping down in 2023, partly to speak more openly about the existential dangers posed by A.I.
Since leaving Google, Hinton has become increasingly outspoken about the risks he believes A.I. presents and the insufficient efforts to contain them. Once estimating a 10 percent chance that A.I. could lead to humanity’s extinction, he’s since revised that to around 20 percent. “Overall, I think things are probably getting worse because regulations aren’t coming fast enough,” he said, adding, “very little is being done to address the existential threat” posed by A.I.
AI models able to defend themselves
The professor is particularly alarmed by signs that some A.I. systems are exhibiting self-preservation behaviors. Earlier this year, for example, the startup Anthropic revealed that its Claude model has the capacity to blackmail engineers it believes are trying to shut it down—something Hinton described as “pretty scary.”
As nations race to develop increasingly powerful A.I., global cooperation has lagged far behind. Hinton warned that international collaboration will be crucial to prevent catastrophic outcomes. “We should be able to get international collaboration on, ‘How do you train them so they don’t want to take over?’” he said.
Mundane jobs most likely to be replaced by A.I.
A.I.’s impact on the labor market remains difficult to predict. In 2016, Hinton forecasted that A.I. would render radiologists obsolete within five years. This guess, as Hinton himself will admit, did not take place. In fact, the field is actually thriving with the integration of A.I.
“I think I was wrong by a factor of three—partly because I underestimated the conservativeness of the medical profession,” he said. Still, Hinton believes A.I. will inevitably displace many jobs centered around “mundane intellectual labor,” such as call center operators.
Young people need to career plan carefully
For young people entering the workforce, this creates a period of deep uncertainty. Entire fields may vanish or transform dramatically, making career planning more precarious than ever. “We’re at a point in history where we’ve got no experience of what’s to come,” said Hinton. His advice to students: pursue a well-rounded education—for example, liberal arts paired with some mathematics and science—instead of placing all their bets on a single technical skill.
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