Sigmund Freud would like a word with the “godfather of AI.”
Geoffrey Hinton, Nobel laureate and professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Toronto, argues it’s only a matter of time before AI becomes power-hungry enough to threaten the wellbeing of humans. In order to mitigate the risk of this, the “godfather of AI” said tech companies should ensure their models have “maternal instincts,” so the bots can treat humans, essentially, as their babies.
AI’s potential hazard to humanity comes from its desire to continue to function and gain power, according to Hinton.
To prevent these outcomes, Hinton said the intentional development of AI moving forward should not look like humans trying to be a dominant force over the technology. Instead, developers should make AI more sympathetic toward people to decrease its desire to overpower them. According to Hinton, the best way to do this is to imbue AI with the qualities of traditional femininity. Under his framework, just as a mother cares for her baby at all costs, AI with these maternal qualities will similarly want to protect or care for human users, not control them.
“The right model is the only model we have of a more intelligent thing being controlled by a less intelligent thing, which is a mother being controlled by her baby,” Hinton said.
“If it’s not going to parent me, it’s going to replace me,” he added. “These super-intelligent caring AI mothers, most of them won’t want to get rid of the maternal instinct because they don’t want us to die.”
“If you look at what the big companies are doing right now, they’re lobbying to get less AI regulation. There’s hardly any regulation as it is, but they want less,” Hinton said in April. “We have to have the public put pressure on governments to do something serious about it.”
