AI ‘godfather’ Geoffrey Hinton says it might turn out humans would have been better off without AI

Nobel winner who devised concept of neural network warns AI could be near to triggering major incident such as power or banking shutdown… One of the “godfathers of AI”, Geoffrey Hinton, has said it could turn out that humans would have been better off never developing the technology as he warned it could trigger a large-scale incident this year or next such as a temporary blackout of financial or power systems.

The Nobel prize-winning computer scientist told the Guardian he is not a “doomer” about the technology that is underpinned by his groundbreaking research into artificial neural networks and believes AI has the potential to lead to a “wonderful future” but he said “it might be that we would have been better off never developing it”.

Hinton, 78, said that within a decade and possibly sooner, humanity will know whether it can manage the technology’s risks and enable what he called “radical abundance” or whether “we fail to manage the risks and … have a huge gap between rich and poor, huge cultural problems, massive unemployment, just society being torn…