LBC has interviewed Geoffrey Hinton. Hinton, the so-called “Godfather of AI,” won the Nobel Prize for physics last year. He received the Nobel Prize for “foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.”

The LBC summary of the interview reads: “Geoffrey Hinton… told LBC’s Andrew Marr that artificial intelligences had developed consciousness – and could one day take over the world.”

The interview is also available on YouTube.

“All the way through the development of computers and AI people have talked about consciousness,” says interviewer Andrew Marr. Then he asks, “do you think that consciousness has perhaps already arrived inside AI?”

A real ‘they’ there

Hinton answers: “yes, I do.”

There may well be a real “they” there, says Hinton.

“There’s all sorts of things we have only the dimmest understanding of at present about the nature of people and what it means to be a being and what it means to have a self,” continues Hinton. “We don’t understand those things very well and they’re becoming crucial to understand because we’re now creating beings.”

Hinton admits that these beings are like “alien intelligences” working their way into our economy, and at some point they would want to replace us.

He seems very skeptical of the possibility to control superintelligent beings smarter than us like we are smarter than a three-year-old. There aren’t many examples “of more intelligent things being controlled by much less intelligent things.”

“It wouldn’t be very difficult for you to persuade a bunch of three-year-olds to cede power to you,” he says, “you just tell them you get free candy for a week.”

Hinton has spoken out for years about the risks of artificial intelligence. He quit Google in 2023 so he could continue warning about the impact of the technology freely. Some AI enthusiasts have criticized him for having a pessimistic view on the future of AI.

Let us know your thoughts! Sign up for a Mindplex account now, join our Telegram, or follow us on Twitter.