Geoffrey Hinton, formerly from Google, and now at University of Toronto is one of godfathers of AI, along with Lecun and Bengio. He was speaking at the Collision tech conference in the Canadian city to a packed audience of 30,000 startup founders, investors and techies. It was Wednesday, the 28th June, 2023. He urged the governments across the world to make sure that machines do not take control of society. The audience attending was to explore how they can ride the AI wave, and were not much interested in knowing about the dangers of AI.

Hinton strongly feels that AI can take the control away from the human beings. Critics may feel he is overplaying the risks, but he feels the risk real. Besides, AI deepens inequality — it would make the rich, richer, and the poor, poorer. He was worried about fake news spread by ChatGPT-like bots.

Hinton feels AI-generated content should be distinguished by putting a watermark-like sign which is used to mark the currency. The European Union may consider such a move in its legislation.

The conference discussions were far from the threats posed by AI. They were about the opportunities created by the new technology. It is too premature to consider AI as an existential threat. As Andrew Ng puts it, it is ‘like talking about overpopulation on Mars.’