Geoffrey Hinton dubbed the AI godfather, cautioned the world about the possibility of AI eating many jobs, mooting the idea of universal basic income for people.
In an interview with BBC Newsnight, he said, “AI can be taking lots of mundane jobs.” He advocated giving a fixed amount of cash in hand to people to ease the adversities.
According to Hinton, AI will stimulate productivity enhancement and wealth generation. The downside would be unless the government intervenes, the rich would get richer, pooling in hoards of money. On the other hand, the common citizens would be facing job losses and money crunch.
Data collected by Statista shows that 38 percent of jobs in the United States are at the cusp of automation, while the figure in the United Kingdom is 30 percent. According to the World Economic Forum’s “The Future of Jobs 2018” report, robots will perform about 52 percent of current job tasks by 2025.
He said, “My guess is in between five and 20 years from now there’s a probability of half that we’ll have to confront the problem of AI trying to take over”.
AI taking over poses an “extinction-level threat” for humans because Professor Hinton believes we could have “created a form of intelligence that is just better than biological intelligence… That’s very worrying for us”.
Developments over the last year exhibit how the governments let the unbridled employment of AI in the military. While the rat race to develop products rapidly signals the hazardous practice of tech companies of not putting much effort into safety.
Professor Hinton cautioned AI is helping generate thousands of military targets and called it the “thin end of the wedge”.
“What I’m most concerned about is when these can autonomously make the decision to kill people,” he said.
Professor Hinton also raised similar concerns in the Geneva Conventions, exhorting regulating the use of AI for military purposes. He, however, is concerned about establishments ignoring the devastating effect of AI and not taking concrete and cohesive actions toward it.