AI is bad – will be exploited by bad actors and authoritarian leaders

Schmidhuber’s position contrasts with a number of his contemporaries, including Dr Geoffrey Hinton, who spectacularly quit Google this week after a decade with the company in order to speak more freely on AI.

Hinton, who is referred to as the godfather of AI, won the Turing award in 2018 for his work on “deep learning”, which is the foundation for much of the AI in use today.

Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called ‘godfather of AI’, who quit Google in order to speak more freely on AI.

He said companies like Google had stopped being proper stewards for AI in the face of competition to advance the technology. He believes if AI becomes more intelligent than humans, it could be exploited by bad actors, including authoritarian leaders.

But Schmidhuber, who has had a long-running dispute with Hinton and others in his industry over appropriate credit for AI research, says much of these fears are misplaced. He says the best counter to bad actors using AI will be developing good tools with AI.

“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,” he says.

“And I would be much more worried about the old dangers of nuclear bombs than about the new little dangers of AI that we see now.”

Schmidhuber believes AI will advance to the point where it surpasses human intelligence and has no interest in humans – while humans will continue to benefit and use the tools developed by AI. This is a theme Schmidhuber has discussed for years, and was once accused at a conference of “destroying the scientific method” with his assertions.

As the Guardian has reported previously, Schmidhuber’s position as AI’s father is not undisputed, and he can be a controversial figure within the AI community. Some have said his optimism about the rate of technological progress was unfounded and possibly dangerous.

A coloured magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan of an axial section through a healthy brain

In addition to Hinton, others more recently have called for AI development to slow down. Billionaire Elon Musk was one of 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”.