Geoffrey Hinton’s AI warning: Could AI really kill humans within a decade?

Artificial intelligence is at the critical junction marked by the blurring of lines between a force for good or a destructive one.

On Tuesday, Anthropic researcher resigned from his post while issuing a dire warning regarding proliferating risks of artificial intelligence at breakneck pace.

Jacob Coxon, a researcher who specializes in training new AI models, has sounded alarm over competitive and irresponsible races among tech giants to build superintelligent AI models without considering significant protocols.

Another researcher Anthropic Alignment Science Lead Evan Hubinger has warned that there is a greater than 10% probability that advanced artificial intelligence could cause human extinction within the next ten years, noting that the industry still lacks a reliable plan to align superintelligence.

Here comes the viewpoint of AI Godfather and Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton. The pioneer of artificial intelligence has endorsed a grim outlook, telling the BBC in an interview that there is over a 10% probability that advanced AI could cause human extinction within the next ten years, calling the estimate "not unreasonable."

Upon asking where he believed that there was a greater than 10 percent chance that AI could kill all humans within a decade, Hinton answered that such risk is extremely difficult as humanity has never faced a similar situation before.

"We've never created beings that may soon be smarter than us. We don't know what's going to happen," Hinton said.

"A 10% chance seems not an unreasonable estimate to me. But nobody really knows how to give a sensible estimate," he added.

According to Hinton, the advanced AI systems in future would not need physical control of the world to cause destruction and extinction.

He said, "The first thing to realise is it doesn't even have to be able to act in the real world to cause devastation. It would be able to cause complete chaos just by talking to people."

"It could do devastating cyberattacks. And there's just countless other ways it could get rid of us if it wanted to," he warned.