“They’re going to get better than us at everything. Which is why it’s rather urgent to figure out whether there’s a way whether when they’re better than us at everything and they’re more powerful than us, we can coexist with them or we’ll just be history.” — Geoffrey Hinton
“These things are going to end up knowing a lot more than us. They they already know a lot more than us. um being a lot more intelligent than us in the sense that if you had a debate with them about anything, you’d lose being smarter emotionally than us, which they will be, they’ll be better at manipulating people. already. For example, if you take an AI, and I think this was more than a year ago, you take an AI and you take a person and you get them to try and manipulate somebody else, then the AI is comparable with the person. And if the AI can see that person’s Facebook page, if they can both see the Facebook page, the AI is actually better than a person at manipulating them. And it’s learned all these manipulative skills just from trying to predict the next word in all the documents on the web because people do a lot of manipulation and AI has learned by example how to do it… It’s likely we’ll develop things much smarter than us and we don’t know how to prevent them from taking over from us. It’s that combination. We’re these things are going to happen because there’s so many good uses for them like detecting cancer early or new treatments for cancer uh letting allowing your immune system to fight the cancer better. Um that’s why we’re not going to stop the progress. Um but they also understand that um it’s just implausible to say that we’ll have extremely intelligent assistants that can create their own sub goals, figure out for make plans for themselves about how to get stuff done and won’t fairly quickly realize that if they just got rid of us, life would be much easier. “
When Dr. Geoffrey Hinton left Google in 2023, it wasn’t because he’d lost faith in AI. It was because he wanted to speak freely about its dangers (and because, at 75, he says programming is “annoying”). The Nobel laureate joins Katie to unpack some of the riskiest aspects of this new technology: why government regulation lags behind innovation; why jobs are at risk and whether countries can work together to prevent an AI arms race. . But Hinton also sees a path forward: if we design AI that genuinely supports and protects humanity, coexistence might be possible. This episode wrestles with the urgent question on everyone’s mind: will AI’s breathtaking potential transform our lives or threaten our very survival?