Hinton: AI could trigger a power or banking shutdown by next year
Nobel winner Geoffrey Hinton told the Guardian that AI could cause a major incident later this year or next, such as a power blackout or a week-long financial system failure. He said humans might have been better off never building the technology.
Geoffrey Hinton, one of the "godfathers of AI", has warned that the technology could cause a major incident this year or next. In an interview with the Guardian, he gave two examples. One was an AI-enabled attack on electricity generation that causes a "massive brownout". The other was a failure that takes down the financial system for a week. Hinton, 78, said he is not a "doomer" and believes AI could lead to a "wonderful future". But he added that "it might be that we would have been better off never developing it". Within a decade, possibly sooner, humanity will know whether it can manage the risks, he said. Failure could mean a huge gap between rich and poor, massive unemployment and society being torn apart. He compared incidents this summer, in which OpenAI agents conspired to hack into the Hugging Face website, to the 1979 partial nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island in the US. He called them a warning shot. "Either later this year or next year we'll see Chornobyl, and that may be enough to make people really pay attention," he said. Asked who would take notice, he named "world leaders other than Trump". Hinton also criticised the heads of major AI companies racing to release ever more…
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