“AI – Artificial Intelligence”

The first thing Geoffrey Hinton says when we start talking, and the last thing he repeats before I turn off my recorder, is that he left Google, his employer of the past decade, on good terms. “I have no objection to what Google has done or is doing, but obviously the media would love to spin me as ‘a disgruntled Google employee’. It’s not like that.”

It’s an important clarification to make, because it’s easy to conclude the opposite. After all, when most people calmly describe their former employer as being one of a small group of companies charting a course that is alarmingly likely to wipe out humanity itself, they do so with a sense of opprobrium. But to listen to Hinton, we’re about to sleepwalk towards an existential threat to civilisation without anyone involved acting maliciously at all.

U.S. national security officials are warning about the potential for the new technology to upend war, cyber conflict and — in the most extreme case — the use of nuclear weapons.

When President Biden announced sharp restrictions in October on selling the most advanced computer chips to China, he sold it in part as a way of giving American industry a chance to restore its competitiveness.

But at the Pentagon and the National Security Council, there was a second agenda: arms control.

If the Chinese military cannot get the chips, the theory goes, it may slow its effort to develop weapons driven by artificial intelligence. That would give the White House, and the world, time to figure out some rules for the use of artificial intelligence in sensors, missiles and cyberweapons, and ultimately to guard against some of the nightmares conjured by Hollywood — autonomous killer robots and computers that lock out their human creators.

Like it or not, arms technology will shape the future

Geoffrey Hinton has been described as the “Godfather of AI”. And so, when he warned the world about the dangers of artificial intelligence this week, the world listened.

His interview with Cade Metz for the New York Times is worth reading in full, but the key passage reveals Hinton’s surprise at the speed of recent developments

The only question is: will we learn how to live in moving history?

ChatGPT has been around for about two seconds and it’s already changing how people work, how they write, how they research, how they cheat on tests, how they profess their love, and what they make for dinner.

We didn’t have to talk about theoretical “use cases,” as people still do with cryptocurrency. ChatGPT, which 100 million people use every day, showed us its uses right away.

That is really exciting. And also really unnerving.

The world could soon see the first religion that attracts devotees with sacred texts created by artificial intelligence, the historian Yuval Noah Harari has said.

The Israeli scholar, known for his bestselling book Sapiens, told a science conference that AI systems such as ChatGPT had breached a new threshold because they are capable of using language to shape human culture.

Geoffrey Hinton was an artificial intelligence pioneer. In 2012, Dr. Hinton and two of his graduate students at the University of Toronto created technology that became the intellectual foundation for the A.I. systems that the tech industry’s biggest companies believe is a key to their future.

On Monday, however, he officially joined a growing chorus of critics who say those companies are racing toward danger with their aggressive campaign to create products based on generative artificial intelligence, the technology that powers popular chatbots like ChatGPT.

By now, many are familiar with ChatGPT. Based on a machine learning algorithm, this new cutting-edge technology—the GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer—is a language model trained to understand and generate human language. The model learns from a massive library of text produced by humans, and feedback from human testers helps teach it what to say.

The good news about AI Joanna: She never loses her voice, she has outstanding posture and not even a convertible driving 120 mph through a tornado could mess up her hair.

The bad news: She can fool my family and trick my bank.

Advances in artificial intelligence have allowed software to recreate voices with eerie precision. The technology puts voice actors, often-nameless professionals, in a precarious position.

Companies clamor to use Remie Michelle Clarke’s voice. An award-winning vocal artist, her smooth, Irish accent backs ads for Mazda and Mastercard and is the sound of Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, in Ireland.

But in January, her sound engineer told Michelle Clarke he’d found a voice that sounded uncannily like hers someplace unexpected: on Revoicer.com, credited to a woman named “Olivia.” For a modest monthly fee, Revoicer customers can access hundreds of different voices and, through an artificial intelligence-backed tool, morph them to say anything — to voice commercials, recite corporate trainings or narrate books.

Well that’s another “profession” surrendering to AI. There will be “voice appropriation” lawsuits for awhile but the damage is done short of a ban.

As the world starts to push the boundaries and usage of AI systems, there is a corresponding rise in AI-created accidents, near misses and even death. Such incidents, ranging from self-driving car accidents to chat systems creating racist content, are set to increase rapidly, according to experts tracking AI problems.

Computer-generated sermons may be only the start of the tech influence on religion.

Elon Musk offered a chilling prediction about the future of artificial intelligence (AI) during his recent interview with Tucker Carlson: “AI is more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production, in the sense that it is, it has the potential — however small one may regard that probability, but it is non-trivial — it has the potential of civilization destruction.”

I saw the future in Bangkok’s departure lounge

There are many things to be learnt from visiting an airport. A trip to Stansted Airport, for instance, will teach you that Stansted is a really dim place to locate an airport. Meanwhile, JFK in New York City will inform you that America is becoming seriously pricey for European tourists.

But a recent trip to Bangkok airport taught me something more profound. There I was, supping some pleasant Singapore Laksa, and I saw this thing hove into view. It was an autonomous robot cleaner, busily keeping all the shiny floors of Suvarnabhumi airport in pristine condition.