Good afternoon. On 31 March, Geoffrey Hinton – a 75-year-old British-Canadian scientist who won the 2018 Turing Award, the “Nobel of computing”, for his foundational work in AI – resigned from Google, where he had guided AI research for a decade. News of his departure soon shot around the world.
Last month he returned to King’s College, Cambridge, where he had been an undergraduate in the 1960s, to deliver a message: the threat of a super-powerful AI was real and immediate. “I decided to shout fire,” I heard him tell a packed lecture hall. “I don’t know what to do about it or which way to run.” It may be, he added, that humans are “a passing stage in the evolution of intelligence”.
For a long time, Hinton explained, he had believed that machine intelligence could not surpass biological intelligence. “A few months ago, I suddenly changed my mind,” he said at the Cambridge event. “I don’t think there is anything special about people, other than to other people.”
Hinton’s story is fascinating. I’ve sought to tell it in this week’s NS cover. He hasn’t sat down for much of the past 18 years (he can’t for long); his relationship with his father still shadows him at 75; and he lost both of his wives to cancer. “Early and accurate diagnosis” of illness, he said in 2017, “is not a trivial problem. We can do better. Why not let machines help us?”
For fifty years he has sought to build an artificial brain. For much of that time, he was a fringe figure in the world of AI. Hinton coined the term “deep learning”, but a different paradigm for how to build AI held for decades. He was long ignored.
Hinton shared the 2018 Turing Award with two other founders of the field. I spoke to one of them, Yoshua Bengio, who shares Hinton’s fear that we will not be able to control machines smarter than ourselves. (“It’s very difficult to write a reward function that does exactly what you want. The AI finds loopholes.”)
But the third Turing winner – Yann LeCun, who Hinton taught and has known since 1985 – thinks his former mentor and friend is completely wrong. (“AI will save the world, not destroy it. Geoff only started thinking about these things a couple of months ago.”)
AI can be a forbidding and abstract subject. But it came alive for me talking to Hinton. I hope it might come alive for you too. Some excerpts follow below. If you’d like to click through, the piece is currently free to read. Thank you.
The existential peril of AI is becoming a story of our times. In June 2022 Blake Lemoine, a Google software engineer, went public with his fear that LaMDA, a large language model (LLM) that Google had developed, was sentient, that it had feelings, and wanted to be respected. Google fired him a month later. In May 2023, a colonel in the US Air Force revealed a simulation in which an AI-enabled drone, tasked with attacking surface-to-air missiles but acting under the authority of a human operator, attacked the operator instead. (The US Air Force later denied the story.)
In the days after his talk at Cambridge, I met Hinton at his home near Hampstead, north London. “Emotionally, I don’t believe what I’m saying [about AI],” he told me. “I just believe it intellectually.” What is stopping him from believing it? “Well, it’s too awful.” What is? “Them taking over. It’s not going to be pretty. Did you ever see a big change of power like that, that was pretty?” But couldn’t we turn off a machine that threatened us? “No, you can’t. You will be completely dependent on it by then.”
“We’re dealing with an event that’s never occurred before in human history, of something more intelligent than us,” he said, after offering me a tea and sitting on a stack of foam pads to ease his back (he soon stood up).
It was a compelling remark, but Hinton had used it before, in 2015. “There is not a good track record of less intelligent things controlling things of greater intelligence,” he told the New Yorker in a brief exchange. If that threat is not new to Hinton, what is? The speed at which a fearful future is accelerating into the present. “It shouldn’t have been so much of a surprise. I always thought AI would catch up with the brain. I didn’t think it would overtake it that quickly. That’s what’s really changed. It’s become urgent.”
I asked Hinton for the strongest argument against his own position. “Yann thinks its rubbish,” he replied. “It’s all a question of whether you think that when ChatGPT says something, it understands what it’s saying. I do.”
Bonus links
I watched Into the Wild in the week I left university (nine years ago, somehow). I only just discovered the magazine piece that inspired it, by John Krakauer from 1993. I love this spare writing. (“The Teklanika was running big, cold, and fast.”)
Madison Marriage and Antonia Cundy recently wrote what may be the story of year: their investigation into how Crispin Odey evaded sexual assault allegations for 25 years. Odey has since been forced out of his eponymous firm. Antonia followed it up with this cover on the plight of Filipino fisherman working off the shores of Britain. Matt Vella, the FT Magazine editor, is creating a space for American longform in Britain – it’s exciting to see. (Where else can you write long in Britain? I’d say: the NS, the Guardian Long Read, 1843, the LRB, Granta under its new editor perhaps, and the New Left Review when I can grasp it.)
Lewis Goodall has started writing for the NS – he wrote a good piece Monday on how Johnson has become more like Trump.
There are so many ways in which we could make the world around us more green at barely any cost: why don’t we do it?
God, say something interesting would you Keir? Something more than ChatGPT could have spluttered in imitation of your refusal to reveal anything, if you have anything to reveal. I get it. I get the sad, shallow, cynical politics of it all. (As Steve Richards writes, timidity rules the day for Labour. We are heading for a flood of disaffected Labour voters by the end of 2025, should they win, as very little in Britain seems likely to have changed. Labour are ruling out radicalism at every chance.)
Gavin Jacobson has written an extremely entertaining piece on a social type he describes as “Waterstones Dad”. It’s already becoming a part of the culture. I enjoyed Danny Finkelstein’s reply – I think it was the only defensive tack that worked.
Out in the wild – from tomorrow. Thank you. Have a good week.