Ten minutes before I meet Geoffrey Hinton, the ‘godfather of AI’, the New York Times announces he’s leaving Google. After decades working on artificial intelligence, Hinton now believes it could wipe out humanity. ‘It is like aliens have landed on our planet and we haven’t quite realised it yet because they speak very good English,’ he says. He also tells me that he has been unable to sleep for months.
‘It’s conceivable that the genie is already out of the bottle’
Hinton, 75, revolutionised AI not once but twice: first with his work on neural networks, computer architecture that closely resembles the brain’s structure, and then with so-called ‘deep learning’, which allows AI to refine and extract patterns and concepts on a vast quantity of data. He persevered with neural networks during the 1970s and 1980s when the industry had largely abandoned it. In 1986 he designed the very first chatbot, then called a ‘language predictor model’.
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