BBC Newsnight presenter Victoria Derbyshire was left speechless after Nobel Prize winner and 'Godfather of AI' Geoffrey Hinton warned there is a 10 percent chance artificial intelligence could kill all humans within a decade.
Nobel Prize laureate Geoffrey Hinton appeared on Newsnight on Wednesday (September 9), following claims by former AI company worker Jacob Coxon that there's a 10 percent likelihood AI could 'wipe out all humans within a decade'.
Hinton's chilling estimate
British-Canadian computer scientist Hinton, who bagged the Nobel Prize for physics in 2024, was grilled by BBC host Victoria Derbyshire about the veracity of Coxon's alarming predictions. He initially stated it was 'very hard to estimate' whether the software could obliterate all human life by 2036, and urged engineers to exercise 'caution'.
However, much to Victoria Derbyshire's shock, he added: "It would be foolish to say there's a one percent chance. Nobody knows how to estimate it. A 10 percent chance seems not unreasonable to me."
The seasoned presenter then queried Hinton: "You just said that 10 percent doesn't seem an unreasonable estimate that AI could kill all humans."
His succinct response initially rendered her speechless. "Yes," he confirmed.
Following a pause, Ms Derbyshire exclaimed: "Wow. Oh my God."
Ways AI could cause devastation
She then probed the scientist, who stepped down from a role at Google in 2023 to raise the alarm about AI's advancement, on how the software could bring about the end of thousands of years of human civilisation.
In a chilling response, he said: "If it's much smarter than us there are so many ways I do not think it's worth speculating."
When pressed further, he elaborated: "It does not even have to act in the real world to cause devastation. It can cause complete chaos by talking to people."
"It can design very nasty biological and computer viruses. It could do devastating cyber attacks and there's countless other ways to get rid of us, if it wanted to.
"We have to figure out how to design it so it does not want to."
This isn't the first time Hinton has issued such warnings, having previously raised concerns about AI's military potential shortly after his departure from Google.
