Careful what you wish for

Geoffrey Hinton made it his life’s work to develop machine learning, but the Google guru has stepped back and he has a warning for the rest of us

- John Naughton

An eminent, elderly British scientist lobbed a grenade last week into the febrile anthill of researchers and corporations obsessed with artificial intelligence or AI (AKA, for the most part, a technology called machine learning). The scientist was Geoffrey Hinton, and the bombshell was the news that he was leaving Google, where he had been doing great work on machine learning for 10 years, because he wanted to be free to express his fears about where the technology he had played a seminal role in founding was heading.

To say that this was big news would be an epic understatement. The tech industry is a huge, excitable beast that is occasionally prone to outbreaks of "irrational exuberance", ie madness. One recent bout involved cryptocurrencies and a vision of the future of the internet called "Web3", which an astute young blogger and critic, Molly White, memorably described as "an enormous grift that's pouring lighter fluid on our already smouldering planet".

We are in the grip of another outbreak of exuberance triggered by "Generative AI" - chatbots, large language models (LLMs) and other artefacts enabled by massive deployment of machine learning - which the industry now regards as the future for which it is busily tooling up.

Just weeks ago, more than 27,000 people including many who are knowledgeable about the technology - became so alarmed about the rush towards a machine-driven dystopia that they issued an open letter calling for a six-month pause in the development of the technology. "Advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth," they said, "and should be planned for and managed with commensurate care and resources."