Toronto – At 77, Geoffrey Hinton It has a new vocation in life. As a prophet of modern times, the winner of the Nobel Prize is giving the alarm about the dangers of non -controlled and unregulated artificial intelligence.
Frequently nicknamed the “Lady of the AI”Hinton is known for his pioneer work in deep learning and neural networks that helped lay the basis of AI technology used today. Feeling “something responsible”, he began to speak publicly about his concerns in 2023 after leaving his job on Google, where he worked for more than a decade.
As technology – and investment dollars – that boost AI have advanced in recent years, they have also done bets behind it. “It really is like a god,” said Hinton.
Hinton is among a growing number of prominent figures of technology that speak of AI using a language that was previously reserved for the divine. The executive director of OpenAI, Sam Altmanhe has referred to his company’s technology as a “magical intelligence in heaven”, while Peter Thielthe co -founder of Paypal and Palantir, has even argued that AI could help provoke the antichrist.
Will AI bring condemnation or salvation?
There are many skeptics that doubt that technology deserves this kind of fear, including Dylan Bakeran old Google employee and chief research engineer at the Distributed AI Research Institute, who studies the harmful impacts of AI.
“I think they are often operating from a magical and fantastic thought informed by a lot of science fiction that presumably obtained in their years of training,” Baker said. “They are really detached from reality.”
Although chatbots like chatgpt have only recently penetrated the Zeitgeistcertain circles of Silicon Valley have prophesied the power of AI for decades.
“We are trying to wake up people,” said Hinton. “For the public to understand the risks, so that the public presses politicians to do something about it.”
While researchers like Hinton are warning about the existential threat that believe that AI raises humanity, there are executive and theoretical directors on the other side of the spectrum that argue that we are approaching a kind of technological apocalypse that will mark the beginning of a new era of human evolution.
In an essay published last year entitled “Machines of love grace: how AI could transform the world for better”, the executive director of Anthropic, Dario Amodeiexposes his vision of a future “if everything goes well with AI.”
The AI entrepreneur predicts “the defeat of most diseases, the growth of biological and cognitive freedom, the lifting of billions of poverty to share new technologies, a rebirth of liberal democracy and human rights.”
While Amodei opts for the “powerful” phrase, others use terms such as “singularity” or “artificial general intelligence (AGI).” Although the defenders of these concepts do not usually agree on how to define them, they refer in general terms to a hypothetical future point in which AI will exceed human level intelligence, which could trigger rapid and irreversible changes in society.
THE COMPUTER AND AUTHOR Ray Kurzweil He has been predicting since the 1990s that humans will one day be merged with technology, a concept often called transhumanism.
“We are not going to really say what comes from our own brain in the face of what comes from AI. Everything will be embedded within ourselves. And it will become smarter,” Kurzweil said.
In his last book, “The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge With AI”Kurzweil redoubles his previous predictions. He believes that by 2045 we will have “multiplied our own intelligence a million times.”
“Yes,” he finally granted when asked if he considers that AI is his religion. Informs your sense of purpose.
“My thoughts about the future and the future of technology and how fast is I definitely affecting my attitudes towards being here and what I am doing and how I can influence other people,” he said.
VISIONS OF APOCALYPS BUBJUJEAN
Despite Thiel’s explicit invocation of the Language of Apocalypse’s book, the positive visions of a future of AI are more “apocalyptic” in the historical sense of the word.
“In the ancient, apocalyptic is not negative,” he explains Domenico AgostiniProfessor at the University of Naples L’Orienta who studies ancient apocalyptic literature. “We have completely changed the semantics of this word.”
The term “apocalypse” comes from the Greek word apokálypsiswhich means “revelation.” Although it is often associated today with the end of the world, the apocalypse in ancient Jewish and Christian thought were a source of encouragement in times of difficulty or persecution.
“God is promising a new world,” said the professor Robert Geraciwhich studies religion and technology at the Knox College. “To occupy that new world, you have to have a new glorious body that triumphs over the evil that we all experience.”
Geraci noticed for the first time that an apocalyptic language was used to describe the potential of AI in the early 2000s. Kurzweil and other theorists finally inspired him to write his 2010 book, “Apocalyptic AI: Visions of Heaven in Robotics, artificial Intelligence, and Virtual reality”.
Language reminded him of primitive Christianity. “Only we are going to slide to God and slide in … your choice of cosmic scientific laws that supposedly do this and then we will have the same type of glorious future to come,” he said.
Geraci argues that this type of language has not changed much since he began studying it. What surprises him is how generalized he has become. “What was previously very rare is everywhere,” he said.
Have you finally found Silicon Valley to your God?
A factor in the growing cult of AI is profitability. “Twenty years ago, that fantasy, true or not, was not generating a lot of money,” said Geraci. Now, however, “there is a financial incentive for Sam Altman to say that the AGI is just around the corner.”
But Geraci, who argues that Chatgpt “is not even remotely, vaguely, plausibly aware,” he believes that there may be more promoting this phenomenon.
Historically, the world of technology has been notoriously lacking religion. His secular reputation had preceded him so much that an episode of the HBO satirical comedy series, “Silicon Valley”revolves around “getting a co -worker as a Christian from the closet.”
Instead of seeing the veneration of AI by the skeptical technological world as ironic, Geraci believes they are causally linked.
“Human beings are deep, deep and inherently religious,” he said, adding that the impressive technologies behind AI could attract people in Silicon Valley who have already set aside “the ordinary approaches of transcendence and meaning.”
No religion is without skeptics
Not all Silicon Valley executive directors have become, even if they want to participate in technology.
“When people in the technology industry speak of building this unique true, it is almost as if they think they are creating God or something,” said the executive director of Meta, Mark Zuckerbergin a podcast last year while promoting his company’s own adventure in AI.
Although transhumanist theories like Kurzweil have become more widespread, they are not yet ubiquitous within Silicon Valley.
“The scientific case for that is not stronger than the case of a life after religious death,” he argues Max Tegmarkphysicist and automatic learning researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Like Hinton, Tegmark has spoken about the potential risks of unregulated AI. In 2023, as president of the Future of Life Institute, Tegmark helped lead an open letter in which he asked the powerful laboratories to “pause immediately” the training of their systems.
The letter collected more than 33,000 signatures, including those of Elon Musk and Apple’s co -founder, Steve Wozniak. Tegmark believes that the letter has been successful because it helped to “generalize the conversation” about the safety of AI, but believes that her work is far from having finished.
With regulations and safeguards, Tegmark thinks that AI can be used as a tool to do things such as healing diseases and increasing human productivity. But it is imperative, he argues, stay away from the “quite marginal” race that some companies are running: “The pseudorreligious search to try to build an alternative god.”
“There are many stories, both in religious texts and, for example, ancient Greek mythology, about how when we humans begin to play the gods, it ends badly,” he said. “And I feel that there is a lot of arrogance in San Francisco at this time.”