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A renowned German scientist, Jürgen Schmidhuber, known as the “father of AI” said, “You cannot stop it,”. The current international race to build more powerful systems, according to The Guardian.
“Surely not on an international level because one country might have really different goals from another country. So, of course, they are not going to participate in some sort of moratorium.”
Schmidhuber said that he doesn’t believe anyone should try to halt progress on developing powerful artificial intelligence systems, arguing that
“In 95% of all cases, AI research is really about our old motto, which is to make human lives longer and healthier, and easier. “It’s just that the same tools that are now being used to improve lives can be used by bad actors, but they can also be used against the bad actors,”
His comments come as other tech leaders and experts have sounded the alarm that the powerful technology poses risks to humanity. Tesla founder Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak joined thousands of other tech experts in signing a letter in March calling for AI labs to pause their research until safety measures are put in place.
Schmidhuber also said that concerns over AI are misplaced and that developing AI-powered tools for good purposes will counter bad actors using the technology.
Schmidhuber has openly criticized Geoffrey Hinton for allegedly failing to cite fellow researchers in his studies, telling The Guardian that AI will exceed human intelligence and ultimately benefit people as they use the AI systems, which follows comments he’s made in the past.
Geoffrey Hinton also a renowned AI scientist announced this month that he quit his job at Google to speak out on his tech fears. On Friday, Hinton said AI could pose “more urgent” risks to humanity than climate change – but even though he shares similar concerns to tech leaders such as Musk, he said pausing AI research at labs is “utterly unrealistic.”
Schmidhuber said:
“Surely not on an international level, because one country might have really different goals from another country. So, of course, they are not going to participate in some sort of moratorium. But then I think you also shouldn’t stop it. Because in 95% of all cases, AI research is really about our old motto, which is to make human lives longer and healthier and easier.”
In addition to Hinton, others more recently have called for AI development to slow down. Billionaire Elon Musk was one of the thousands to sign a letter published in late March by the Future of Life Institute calling for a six-month moratorium on the creation of AIs more powerful than GPT-4, the machine behind ChatGPT.
Musk revealed he had fallen out with Google co-founder Larry Page last month because he said Page was not taking AI safety seriously enough and was seeking to create a digital god.
In March, a group of experts, including tech mogul Elon Musk, signed an open letter urging for a pause in developing AI chatbots that were more advanced than ChatGPT until robust safety measures could be implemented. Yoshua Bengio, another prominent figure in AI and a co-winner of the 2018 Turing Award, also signed the letter, citing the unexpected acceleration in AI systems. However, Dr. Geoffrey Hinton disagreed, stating that he believed AI would provide more benefits than risks in the short term. He added that a pause would be difficult due to international competition and that it was the government’s responsibility to regulate the development of AI.
When talking to BBC, Dr. Hinton emphasized that he did not intend to criticize Google and praised the company for being ‘very responsible.’
“I actually want to say some good things about Google,” he said. “And they’re more credible if I don’t work for Google.”
Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently admitted in an interview that he needed to fully understand everything the company’s AI chatbot, Bard, could do. The concern is that we are currently on a speeding train, and there is a worry that one day it will start building its own tracks.
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