- According to a report by the BBC, Jeffrey Hinton is concerned that AI will take over “many everyday jobs”.
- Hinton advised the UK government to establish a universal basic income to reduce the impact of AI.
- Hinton is a pioneer in neural networks, the basis of artificial intelligence.
Some say AI will be the great equalizer. Some say it is inevitable that the gap between rich and poor will widen.
Jeffrey Hinton, known as the godfather of AI for his pioneering work in neural networks, is a vocal member of the latter group. He told the BBC: “I'm very worried that AI will take away a lot of everyday jobs.” And he believes a universal basic income could be the solution.
“I was consulted by people in Downing Street,” he said, “and I advised them that universal basic income was a good idea.”
Universal basic income is a regular cash payment made to all adults in a given population, regardless of wealth or employment status, with no restrictions on how the money can be spent. It is a hot topic among AI researchers, futurists, and industry leaders as a way to reduce the economic impact of AI.
The idea is also gaining traction in countries such as South Africa, Kenya and India as a way to tackle poverty. And in the United States, many cities and some states are experimenting with guaranteed basic income, which also provides unconditional monthly payments to eligible people.
In Hinton's view, AI will improve productivity and create more wealth. But unless the government intervenes, the rich will only get richer, to the detriment of those who may lose their jobs. “That would be very bad for society,” he said.
Hinton advocates a more cautious approach to AI development, saying AI could become an “extinction-level threat” to humanity in just five to 20 years.
Even those who advocate more aggressive development believe that governments should consider some kind of regular payments to redistribute wealth.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is hard at work developing artificial general intelligence and is conducting his own experiments on universal basic income, the results of which will be published soon. He recently proposed the idea of ”universal basic computing.” Instead of receiving cash, he said, anyone could receive a piece of a future large-scale language model like GPT-7.
“They can use it, resell it or donate it to someone to use in cancer research,” Altman said.
Axel Springer, Business Insider's parent company, has a global deal that allows OpenAI to train models based on its media brands' reporting.
