“AI godfather Geoffrey Hinton: ‘We’re creating alien beings. I’m willing to be selfish and choose humans’”
That’s a real headline from a Guardian article.
No, scientists haven’t discovered extraterrestrials hiding in your chatbot. This is Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel-winning “godfather of AI,” using “alien beings” as a metaphor in a wide-ranging interview: he means AI systems are a genuinely new kind of mind, not that they’re from outer space. Hinton also says, “The reality is, we’re making beings of a different kind. And the big tech companies keep saying: we want it smarter. This is crazy. We should care as much about all the other aspects of a being as you do about its intelligence.”
The interview also covers his well-known estimate that there’s a 10% to 20% chance that AI could cause human extinction in the coming decades — a figure Nvidia’s CEO has publicly dismissed as unscientific, and which plenty of other senior AI researchers, including fellow “godfather” Yann LeCun, don’t share. In short: it’s one prominent, long-time AI skeptic’s personal framing and opinion, delivered in an interview full of political jabs at Trump, not a new scientific finding that machines have become literal alien life.
Did this one cross your feed — and what headline would you have written for it?
Leave a Reply