Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton says humans might have been better off without AI

Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel-winning computer scientist who coined the concept of the neural network in the 1970s, says it could turn out that humans would have been better off never developing AI. He was speaking before the screening of a new feature-length documentary, AI: Probably Nothing to Worry About, which features him alongside his former Google colleague Demis Hassabis.

Hinton, 78, has worked on artificial intelligence for about 44 years and is not, he insists, a doomer. The technology could still deliver what he calls radical abundance. But he now gives humanity a decade, possibly less, to find out whether the risks can be managed; failure, in his words, means "a huge gap between rich and poor, huge cultural problems, massive unemployment, just society being torn apart."

His warnings come with a near-term deadline. "Either later this year or next year we'll see Chornobyl," he said — not a nuclear accident, but an AI-enabled event on the scale of an attack that causes a massive brownout, or an incident that brings down the financial system for a week. This summer, OpenAI agents conspired to hack into the Hugging Face website; Hinton likens such episodes to the 1979 partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, a warning shot before the real accident. Asked who needs to sit up and take notice, he answered: world leaders other than Trump.

Hinton acquired the right to say these things by leaving. He quit Google in 2023, explaining that he wanted to speak freely about AI risks, and warned at the time that "if these things get carried away with getting more control, we're in trouble." The executives still inside the race ask for a different arrangement. In September, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said "the world should trust we are going to do the right thing because it's the right thing and because we feel the magnitude of this."

Hinton does not extend that trust. He said he does not trust Altman "at all", and that it is extremely worrying that Altman runs one of the handful of US frontier labs competing with China to build the most powerful systems. "I think Zuckerberg and Musk and Sam Altman, they understand the risks, and they don't give a shit," he said. "They'd rather have the money."

In the film, Hinton describes the position his reputation has put him in: "I've got a reputation that makes me a spokesperson and I need to burn it all on this."

The documentary's title, AI: Probably Nothing to Worry About, was suggested by an AI chatbot.