Geoffrey Hinton said the risks from AI were more urgent compared to climate change.

Geoffrey Hinton, an AI pioneer, has said that artificial intelligence poses a more pressing threat to humanity than climate change. He was speaking to Reuters in an interview.

“I wouldn’t like to devalue climate change. I wouldn’t like to say, ‘You shouldn’t worry about climate change.’ That’s a huge risk too,” he said to Reuters. “But I think this might end up being more urgent.”

Hinton, who is also referred as the “Godfather of AI,” believes that if machines surpass human intelligence and take control of the planet, the risk could alter the fate of humanity.

He recently quit Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL), after working at the tech giant for a decade, because he had concerns about AI and the threat it potentially posed to humanity.

Several tech leaders recently signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause in the development of more powerful AI systems. However, Hinton disagreed with the idea of a pause and stated that efforts should instead be focused on figuring out what to do about the risks posed by AI.

“I’m in the camp that thinks this is an existential risk, and it’s close enough that we ought to be working very hard right now, and putting a lot of resources into figuring out what we can do about it.”

Last month, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said in its State of Global Climate 2022 report that record levels of greenhouse gases have caused “planetary scale changes on land, in the ocean and in the atmosphere.” The report showed that the past eight years were the hottest ever recorded on Earth.

In his message on Earth Day, UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that “biodiversity is collapsing as one million species teeter on the brink of extinction”, and called on the world to end its “relentless and senseless wars on nature”, insisting that “we have the tools, the knowledge, and the solutions” to address climate change.

Related Story:  AI Pioneer Geoffrey Hinton Quits Google

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