Press enter or click to view image in full sizePhoto by Pawel Czerwinski on UnsplashBut he missed something huge.
Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton, often called the “Godfather of AI” for his enormous contributions to the artificial neural network technology that powers AI, has been on a bit of a tirade against Big Tech recently. From calling out their corporate greed to highlighting the dangers of AI, like Pandora, he has been desperately trying to stuff the fates back into the box. But, in a recent interview with Bloomberg, he turned this up to eleven by calling out AI’s very economic viability. When asked by Bloomberg whether the eye-watering investments in AI will ever pay off, Hinton replied, “I believe that it can’t,” and elaborated, “I believe that to make money you’re going to have to replace human labour.” Now, of course, Hinton, who also believes he has invented a computer god, is focused on the enormous negative impact of AI replacing human labour at scale. It basically turns this multi-trillion-dollar AI bet into a lose-lose situation. After all, if the investment ‘pays off’, the economy will be destroyed, making any kind of investment useless. But what Hinton failed to do was ask, “Can AI replace labour?” Hinton seems unwilling to deface the propaganda propping up his digital Frankenstein’s monster, but fortunately, I have no such qualms. This is why AI can’t replace you, and why that means it is…