A Pioneer In AI is Wondering Whether Humanity Might Be Better Off Without It

The so-called godfather of AI said tech leaders know the risks associated with it but are more concerned with making money than ensuring it is safe.

Geoffrey Hinton, the 78-year-old Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist known for his groundbreaking work with the technology, issued the warning in an interview with The Guardian.

“I think [Mark] Zuckerberg and [Elon] Musk and Sam Altman, they understand the risks, and they don’t give a s***. They’d rather have the money. That’s my belief,” Hinton told the outlet.

Hinton went on to say that he was not a AI “doomer” and that it has tremendous potential, but he also worried that “it might be that we would have been better off never developing it”.

This year there have been some high-profile cybersecurity incidents involving AI. OpenAI was sued after AI agents went rogue, broke out of a testing environment, and hacked tech startup Hugging Face.

AI agents were also responsible for a hack of the Australian government. In June, OpenAI agents escaped during a training and hacked the Australian government website. The incident was not discovered until August.

Hinton told The Guardian that he considered the Hugging Face incident a warning of the potential risks to come. He likened it to the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island power station in Pennsylvania – a precursor to a potentially much more serious incident on the horizon.

“Either later this year or next year we’ll see Chornobyl, and that may be enough to make people really pay attention,” Hinton told The Guardian, speculating that such an incident might involve shutting down infrastructure or the financial system.

Despite the security incidents that occurred earlier this year, investment in AI continues unabated. The Brookings Institute report, Financing the AI buildout, estimates that the total cost of AI infrastructure will be about $10.3 trillion between 2025 and 2032. That figure includes data centers, power systems, networking infrastructure, specialized chips, and other equipment. The report estimates that this investment will represent 3.63 percent of the U.S. GDP annually.

“The projected buildout would be larger relative to the economy than the major U.S. canal, railroad, electrification, highway, and telecommunications investment booms,” writes Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh of Columbia University.

Hinton, who left Google in 2023, told The Guardian that he feels obligated to speak on the topic of AI and the need to approach the technology carefully and thoughtfully.

“We need something like the American FDA for drugs where the companies have to give very good statistical evidence to an independent authority that [the AI model] does more good than harm before it is released,” Hinton told The Guardian.