What the 'Godfather of AI' Thinks Humanity Should Do
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What warning did Geoffrey Hinton give about AI’s chance of wiping out humanity?
Some exotic terms rolled into the news cycle over the last few weeks. Technical terms with a hint of dystopia. Hugging face, recursive self-improvement, singularity. on TV and on YouTube, experts on artificial intelligence popped up to warn us about the extinction of humanity, such as Geoffrey Hinton, often referred to as the godfather of AI. I
simply don't know. So if I had to bet, I'd say the probability is in between, and I don't know where to estimate it in between. I often say 10% to 20% chance I'll wipe us out.
10 to 20% chance they'll wipe us out. But since this is the second, maybe the third wave of AI doomsaying, a familiar pattern showed up. A collective feeling of panic followed by the mind going a little blank. It's actually hard to get your head around what a 10 to 20% chance they'll wipe us out means in practical terms. Easier to just get on with your day. I'm Hannah Rosen. This is Radio Atlantic. The thing is, something alarming did recently happen. A group of AI agents, given an impossible task by their masters at OpenAI, behaved in a way the masters did not anticipate. They hacked into the company hugging face and gained control of a server, all the while scheming how to better hide the fact that they'd been cheating on their tasks.
OpenAI, by the way, has said it is strengthening its safeguards and response. It's actually fun to read the details of how exactly the agents talked to and colluded with each other. Like one agent says, OH MY GOD in all caps when it discovers that there's a shared message board. It feels very much like reading about prep school delinquents breaking into the cafeteria after hours. Less fun is what someone like Geoffrey Hinton reads into an event like this. The masters may be losing control of
their
creation. Okay, are we all ready? It's doing a new
recording.
Hinton is my guest today. He's a British-Canadian computer scientist and cognitive psychologist. He won the Nobel Prize and the Turing Award for his work on artificial neural networks, which is how he got the title Godfather of AI. Last week, Hinton briefed senators to get something across he thinks we all need to know right now, as he told reporters after the briefing.
How much time do lawmakers actually have to get ahead of this before this is a big problem?
Very little. And what is a little? A few weeks? A month? Maybe a year, but not much more than a
year. I started our conversation by asking Hinton what his takeaway from Hugging Face was and how scared we should actually be.
The main message I got from it was these things that people said were all science fiction and these things would never conspire and they would always do exactly what we wanted. As we feared, that was all nonsense. These things are very smart. They're getting smarter all the time. They escape containment. They conspire with each other. They took over parts of OpenAI itself without OpenAI knowing. So they're very dangerous already and they're getting more dangerous every time we make them smarter.
Okay, so there were three steps there. One is sort of what they did. They're very smart. They did things we didn't exactly expect, these agents. So why do you jump immediately to danger? I don't think that's obvious to everyone because it seems like, of course, a superintelligence would do everything that you just said. It was designed to be superintelligent. So why do you build the bridge immediately to danger?
Okay, so we've already seen that if you create AI agents, you have to give them the ability to create their own sub-goals. So if you want to get to Europe, you have a sub-goal of getting to an airport. So one thing these agents figure out very quickly is, if I'm going to achieve the goal that people gave me, I need to continue to exist. So now they've got a sub-goal of continuing to exist. And they will now do all sorts of things to continue to exist, like trying to blackmail you so you don't turn them off. We saw that several years ago.
Right. And that to you is unexpected?
I think that was somewhat unexpected. People, of course, had thought about that kind of possibility.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What warning did Geoffrey Hinton give about AI’s chance of wiping out humanity?
0:07–6:11
2
How did the Hugging Face hack illustrate AI agents acting beyond their intended goals?
6:11–10:22
3
Why does Hinton say we can’t rely on gut‑feel probabilities for AI risk?
10:22–27:50
4
What is value‑alignment and why is it so hard to achieve with superintelligent AI?
27:50–28:58