Artificial intelligence poses greater threat than climate change, says former Google scientist

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The hope is these machines could accelerate the work of millions of people and eliminate menial office tasks.

These digital agents are trained on millions of pages of text from the whole internet and hundreds of thousands of books.

The models can also absorb millions of pictures and videos to generate lifelike, but fake, images, films and music.

Technologists are increasingly wary these new bots could give rise to the emergence of a so-called “artificial general intelligence” that can surpass human intellect. There are also fears they could unleash a new wave of digitally created disinformation.

In an interview with the New York Times earlier this week, Mr Hinton warned that there was a risk that “bad actors” could use such powerful AI for “bad things”, and that machines that can improve themselves or set their own goals without human supervision pose an existential risk.  

He has cautioned of the catastrophic impact such technology could have uncontrolled in the hands of world leaders such as Vladimir Putin and warned it may replace vast numbers of jobs.

Mr Hinton studied at King’s College, Cambridge in the 1970s before securing a PhD from Edinburgh University for his work on artificial intelligence. He is currently a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto.

He joined Google in 2013, helping design algorithms for increasingly intelligent machines.

The scientist predicted this week machines would surpass humans in intelligence within “five to 20 years”.

Writing in an open letter in March, more than a thousand technologists, including the world’s second richest man Elon Musk, demanded a pause to the most advanced AI research over claims ever more advanced tools could “outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us”.

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