Generative AI tools and techniques such as ChatGBT have become widespread in recent months, and the rapid development of these technologies has caused fearful responses to the intrusion of AI into human lives.
Advances in generative AI mean, for many, that robots are creeping into tasks and jobs that were once reserved for humans.
A darker scenario
Although these concerns are right, the negative impact of generative artificial intelligence on human functions constitutes only a very small part of the darker scenario that awaits the world if the situation is not remedied, and these warnings came from the words of the technology pioneer and spiritual father of artificial intelligence Jeffrey Hinton. , who left his job days at Google so he could talk about the dangers of artificial intelligence, without thinking about how it would affect the company.
Who is Geoffrey Hinton and why is he called the godfather of artificial intelligence?
“He is considered one of the most important figures in the history of artificial intelligence, a visionary leader, who helped shape the future of artificial intelligence,” says Bard, who works with generative AI techniques, and the godfather of artificial intelligence Jeffrey Hinton.
Son of a family of scholars
Geoffrey Hinton was born in Wimbledon, Britain, in 1947, and comes from a family of scientists, including his grandfather, mathematician George Boole, in addition to his cousin Joan Hinton, a nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, which produced the world's first nuclear weapons during World War I. The second, and then his father, Jeffrey Taylor, a scientist who became a member of the British Royal Society, which is the oldest scientific academy in the world.
Robotics technology
Geoffrey Hinton received a degree in experimental psychology from the University of Cambridge and a PhD in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh, and post-doctoral work in computer science at leading universities around the world. Backpropagation, a method of training artificial neural networks to enhance machine learning, is a technology currently used by chatbots to interpret requests and generate responses for users.
In 1987 Hinton started a program dedicated to machine learning at the University of Toronto in Canada, and continued to collaborate with his colleagues and students, fascinated by how to train computers to think, see and understand what skeptics at the time called "nonsense".
Make the computer understandable
According to "Sky News", Jeffrey Hinton and two other researchers won in 2012 a competition to build a system that allows the computer to recognize hundreds of objects in images, realizing his dream of making the computer able to think and understand, which is the feature that characterizes the latest version of the ChatGPT program, and from here All these innovations contributed to his acquisition of the title of the godfather of artificial intelligence.
Hinton and colleagues Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever founded DNNresearch for artificial intelligence, machine learning and image recognition systems, sparking interest from Google, which acquired their company in 2013.
Giving him up
After the acquisition, Hinton began working part-time at Google, in addition to his work at the University of Toronto, and from there he established a research team dedicated to developing artificial intelligence at Google, to announce a few days ago that he had given up working with the company, which he described as having acted with great responsibility with intelligence programs. artificial.
What is he afraid of?
The credibility of Jeffrey Hinton's warnings is due to the sober personality that he enjoys. Through several press interviews that followed his leaving his job at Google, he tried to convey the message that the imminent and most urgent danger to humanity is "artificial intelligence" and not "climate change." .
Hinton's disturbing view of the development of artificial intelligence came, after decades of his work in this field, indicating that he believed that machine supremacy over humans was far-fetched, and needed between 30 and 50 years, or even more, but he no longer believes that now.
Hinton says he doesn't want to underestimate climate change, but if humans stop burning carbon eventually things will be fine, whereas with generative AI it's not at all clear what the world should do.
Bad guys exploit artificial intelligence
From Hinton's point of view, the danger of generative artificial intelligence results from the possibility of its exploitation by the bad guys, as through this technology, the machine can be assigned to do positive things, and it can also be assigned to do things that are misleading and aggressive, as this matter is related to the operator of this machine or program .
Contemplating the development of future versions
Hinton also believes that the nervous systems used by programs such as ChatGPT are capable of processing very large amounts of data, which makes them more efficient than the human brain, and more suitable than humans for many jobs, and Hinton believes that we should not rush to Developing future versions of artificial intelligence programs, in order to understand whether we can control them and avoid them becoming independent systems.
Warning of deliberate misrepresentation
Hinton also warned of "deliberate misinformation" associated with generative artificial intelligence, which is fueled by images, videos and stories convincingly created through these programs, which will make it almost impossible to distinguish what is true from what is false, pointing out that the only hope is that the most important works Scientists in the world join hands to find solutions to control artificial intelligence.
Are the fears of the godfather of artificial intelligence legitimate?
The consultant in the field of information technology and the Internet, Engineer Qusai Al-Shatti, says that artificial intelligence has become today a means to improve institutional and individual capabilities and capabilities, and to work in a more efficient manner, indicating that the fears of the spiritual father of artificial intelligence, result from what is called Machine Learning, which is a technology that gives computers the ability to correct She makes her own mistakes, to raise her ability to understand through her dealings with individuals and analyzing data without human intervention.