The "Godfather of AI" resigned from his position at Google, where he has worked for over a decade. He joined a growing chorus of critics who warn of the existential risk artificial intelligence systems pose to humans. 

On Monday, Google computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton tweeted:

"In the NYT today, Cade Metz implies that I left Google so that I could criticize Google. Actually, I left so that I could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts Google. Google has acted very responsibly."

In an interview with The New York Times, Hinton said it was only after quitting Google that he could openly talk about the dangers of AI.  

He still believed the systems were inferior to the human brain in some ways but he thought they were eclipsing human intelligence in others. "Maybe what is going on in these systems," he said, "is actually a lot better than what is going on in the brain."

As companies improve their AI systems, he believes, they become increasingly dangerous. "Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now," he said of AI technology. "Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That's scary."

Until last year, he said, Google acted as a "proper steward" for the technology, careful not to release something that might cause harm. But now that Microsoft has augmented its Bing search engine with a chatbot — challenging Google's core business — Google is racing to deploy the same kind of technology. The tech giants are locked in a competition that might be impossible to stop, Dr. Hinton said. -NYT 

One of his most immediate concerns is that the internet will be flooded with fake videos, photos, and news, and the average person will "not be able to know what is true anymore."

Hinton is concerned that automation will disrupt the job market. Chatbots, like OpenAI's ChatGPT, can already replace personal assistants, translators, and others who handle routine tasks. 

"It takes away the drudge work," he said, adding, "It might take away more than that."

A recent Goldman Sachs research note predicted that AI could lead to some 300 million layoffs among highly paid, non-menial workers in the US and Europe. As Goldman chief economist Jan Hatzius put it:

"Using data on occupational tasks in both the US and Europe, we find that roughly two-thirds of current jobs are exposed to some degree of AI automation, and that generative AI could substitute up to one-fourth of current work. Extrapolating our estimates globally suggests that generative AI could expose the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs to automation" as up to "two thirds of occupations could be partially automated by AI."

And on Monday, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said AI could replace 30% of its back-office jobs over the next five years. 

Back to Hinton, where he continued to warn AI will eventually eclipse human intelligence:

"The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that.

"But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that."

He said he didn't sign the letter in March when more than 1,000 technology leaders, including Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio, called for a six-month moratorium on developing new AI tools more powerful than GPT-4. That's because he didn't want to openly criticize big tech while working for Google.

In 2018, Hinton and two other colleagues received the Turing Award, or "the Nobel Prize of computing," for their work on neural networks. Google acquired his company in 2018 for $44 million, which developed powerful technologies that led to the creation of chatbots. 

In a separate interview, Hinton told BBC News, "I've come to the conclusion that the kind of intelligence we're developing is very different from the intelligence we have." 

"The big difference is that with digital systems, you have many copies of the same set of weights, the same model of the world.

"All these copies can learn separately but share their knowledge instantly. So it's as if you had 10,000 people and whenever one person learned something, everybody automatically knew it. And that's how these chatbots can know so much more than any one person."

One of the most significant risks he sees is authoritarian leaders can use AI technology to "manipulate" the masses. 

Hinton's concerns may be coming a bit late, as the technology is already in use. Similar concerns have been expressed by engineers and scientists in the past, in relation to nuclear power and biochemistry. It's inevitable that the world will eventually face an AI-driven crisis.