IT Home On October 23, Jeffrey Cohn, one of the “AI Father” figures, a British computer scientist, once again issued a pessimistic warning about humanity’s future.
In an interview with the British Daily Telegraph, Hinton insisted that AI has consciousness, and humans must interact peacefully with AI. Otherwise, “we are doomed.”
In his view, even current AI models possess their own consciousness. “AI has a subjective experience at the same level as humans. A recent paper found that if AI believes it is being tested, it will change its behavior. It knows it is being tested. Generally speaking, if something can recognize this situation, it means it has consciousness. Consciousness and the ability to perceive are essentially the same thing.”
Hinton was one of the three recipients of the Turing Award in 2018, and received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2024. The Turing Award is often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of the computer industry,” and Hinton’s research in neural networks has also laid an important foundation for the development of AI in recent years.
Since leaving Google and publicly expressing “regret” over his lifetime research work, Hinton has become one of the most well-known pessimists in the AI field, frequently issuing alarming warnings about the catastrophic consequences that AI might cause. Previously, he predicted that AI would cause mass unemployment, fuel imperialism, and even lead to human extinction.
Hinton believes that the immediate threats posed by AI models are already serious enough. “AI will create dangerous viruses. I think AI will also launch terrifying cyber attacks, just like those smart agents that attacked Hugging Face before. Many AI systems will participate in these attacks. So, many more bad things will happen in the future.”
In another recent interview, Hinton also compared developing AI to “creating extraterrestrial life” and warned humans that “there is only about two years left for adaptation.” This statement continues his previous views.
IT Home reminder: Although Winston’s prediction is significant in the field of AI, there are other influential voices in the industry. Not all “AI fathers” are as pessimistic as Winston.
Yang Likun, who also won the Turing Award in 2018, is not convinced by the heated discussion about so-called “AI consciousness” and believes that it is just a “illusion”. Recently, he also refuted the claim that AI will cause human extinction, stating that such views “go beyond reality”.