Anyone would think twice (perhaps more) before slapping any random stranger on the back, getting up close, and breathlessly confiding that you’re Adolf Hitler’s grandson; or, in our own slightly less troubled times, admitting on social media (where else) that you’ve been working for the last fifteen years as Elon Musk’s spiritual adviser. There are some relationships that it’s best to keep quiet about…some things better left unsaid. So what on earth possessed last year’s Nobel Prize Winner in Physics to announce, without any apparent sense of compunction or embarrassment, that he was (and seemingly still is) the “Godfather of AI”? We’re talking here about Geoffrey Hinton, and it’s not as though he’s even remotely fond of his lumbering Godchild.
Professor Hinton thinks AI is growing up in ways “human beings just don’t understand”; and like any responsible adult, he worries too that his offspring is “becoming smarter every day” (too clever by half, we infer); candidly admitting that when he had the chance, earlier in his career, he even “failed to address safety concerns properly” (https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas).
Talk about irresponsible parenting…even if it might be god-parenting in Geoffrey Hinton’s case.
And just like a lot of other disillusioned dads, he’s blaming just about everyone else for his out-of-control progeny. Major technology corporations are “downplaying” junior’s dangers; failing to take “meaningful action”, and warning that the “rate at which AI is working now is way beyond what anyone expected”. Hell…there’s even an urban myth that Mr Hinton left Google in 2023, after more than a decade with the company, as part of a one-man campaign against the company’s “aggressive AI push”.
Not Such a Bad Dad
But Geoffrey’s not such a bad dad…after all, the World moves inexorably on its metalled ways, and we can’t blame the scientists for where we get to. At the turn of the last Millennium (on the stroke of Midnight, 1 January 1000), there was an outbreak of book burning, for fear the end of the world was nigh and some of the stuff (all of it maybe) might be incriminating. We could blame medieval scientists for that. The industrial revolution spawned the Luddites, with a wrongheaded box seat for highlighting the perilous state of the economy: British dockworkers fought a desperate (and hopeless) campaign against containerisation in the 1970s. And don’t start me on those happy few who earned a healthy living making fax machines, producing carbon paper, mechanical typewriters and assembling Sinclair C5S (look it up…or even better, Google it, if you’re under 60). Scientists never delivered those radical changes newborn from the side of their head: it was we, the public (you and me), who saw the changes and freely embraced them.
And, let’s face it, it’s the same old same old with AI…
The Virtues of AI
AI offers (and delivers) increased operational efficiencies, improved decision making, and an all-around better customer experience. For those (in effect) human drones used to spending mindless days filling in spreadsheets and workbooks, it also avoids mind numbing repetitive tasks and optimises overall resource and decision-making management capabilities (think finance and healthcare management before you leap to the wrong conclusion); and AI is faster, less error prone, and more cost efficient than its human equivalent as well. So what’s not to like?
Perhaps (the now Emeritus) Professor Hinton should take a little more pride in his Godchild. After all, it’s not Adolph Hitler or Elon Musk…
Red Ribbon Asset Management (www.redribbon.co) aims to harness the power of fast-evolving and emerging technologies to meet the needs of global communities as part of a circular economy: combining an understanding of emerging international markets with in-depth recognition of the demands of Planet, People and Profit.
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Red Ribbon Asset Management (www.redribbon.co) aims to harness the full potential of fast evolving and emerging technologies to meet the needs of global communities as part of a circular economy, fully recognising the compelling demands of planet people and profit.
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