The Godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton, has issued a chilling warning that the technology he created could take over the world and it can be stopped. This comes after Elon Musk's AI says Obama was a better president than Trump.
In a recent interview, the British computer scientist expressed his fear that super-intelligent rogue chatbots might realize they have no "use" for humans in their society.
He warned that artificial intelligence, which will be far more intelligent than humans, will seize control of the planet, leading to mass unemployment as jobs are wiped out on a large scale, reports the Daily Star.
People will be thrust into a purposeless universe, their lives completely dominated by their robotic overlords. The 78-year-old suggested it would be 'logical' to halt AI development to avoid a dystopian catastrophe.
However, he believes this is unlikely as the world's largest corporations are obsessed with reaping financial benefits from increasingly advanced AI.
The only "good news," according to Hinton, is that robots won't "eat us" because, being made of silicon, a diet of humans "wouldn't do it much good."
Nevertheless, he urged the global community to establish safeguards to prevent the technology from becoming lethal if it falls into the wrong hands.
Hinton, a cognitive psychologist whose groundbreaking work on artificial neural networks laid the foundation for thinking bots, worked at Google for a decade before resigning to voice his concerns about the dangers of AI.
Last year, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his fundamental discoveries and inventions that have enabled machine learning with artificial neural networks In the feature-length documentary Making God, Geoffrey discussed the risks of artificial general intelligence (AGI) - AI with human-like cognitive abilities.
He said: "Most people are unable to comprehend the idea of things more intelligent than us."
He added: "They always think, 'How are we going to use this thing?' They don't think about how it's going to use us."
Two years ago, Hinton co-authored a policy proposal with 23 other experts, criticizing the ongoing production of increasingly powerful AI until tech companies can prevent 'bots from causing chaos.
The group called for "utterly reckless" companies that continue to develop 'bots before humanity knows how to make them safe to be held accountable for any Terminator-like damage they cause.
Hinton's co-author, Stuart Russell, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, US, pointed out that "sandwich shops" face stricter regulation than tech giants.
He said: "It's time to get serious about advanced AI systems."
He added: "These are not toys."