Professor Geoffrey Hinton, also known as the “godfather of artificial intelligence”, recently spoke to BBC about his worries for job losses due to AI. In the BBC interview, he suggested that in response to the inequalities amplified by AI, the government may need to implement a ‘universal basic income’.
Professor Geoffrey Hinton told BBC Newsnight that a benefits reform giving fixed amounts of cash to every citizen would be needed because he was “very worried about AI taking lots of mundane jobs”.
“I was consulted by people in Downing Street and I advised them that universal basic income was a good idea,” he said.
He said while he felt AI would increase productivity and wealth, the money would go to the rich “and not the people whose jobs get lost and that’s going to be very bad for society”.
Professor Hinton said “my guess is in between five and 20 years from now there’s a probability of half that we’ll have to confront the problem of AI trying to take over”.
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This would lead to an “extinction-level threat” for humans because we could have “created a form of intelligence that is just better than biological intelligence… That’s very worrying for us”.
AI could “evolve”, he said, “to get the motivation to make more of itself” and could autonomously “develop a sub-goal of getting control”.
He said there was already evidence of large language models – a type of AI algorithm used to generate text – choosing to be deceptive.
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