The so-called ‘godfather’ of artificial intelligence, Geoffrey Hinton professor of computer science at the University of Toronto, was formerly with google, but departed in May 2023, because of his stated concerns about AI. Controversially he believes that AI has already developed an elementary capacity to reason, and that this will continue to develop, ultimately leading to AI seeking to overthrow humanity. “I think we have to take the possibility seriously that if they get smarter than us, which seems quite likely, and they have goals of their own, which seems quite likely, they may well develop the goal of taking control,” Hinton said during a June 28 talk at the Collision tech conference in Toronto, Canada. “If they do that, we’re in trouble.”
As with all of these scenarios, there are a lot of philosophical assumptions put in, as the AI crowd to a bot believe that the mind is just a neural net, and thus, machines can in principle think, and be conscious. That, of course, is a big question that philosophers and theologicians still debate.