BREAKING NEWS: BBC presenter left speechless as ‘Godfather of AI’ warns tech ‘could k!ll all humans’
Victoria Derbyshire was speechless for a second – and then came a chilling answer from Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton.
Victoria Derbyshire left speechless by ‘Godfather of AI’s’ warning (Image: BBC Newsnight)
A BBC presenter has been left speechless after the ‘Godfather of AI’ warned the technology has a ‘10 percent chance of k!lling all humans’ in the next decade.
Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton appeared on Newsnight on Wednesday (September 9) in the wake of claims made by a former AI company employee Jacob Coxon that there is a 10 percent chance AI could ‘k!ll all humans within a decade’.
British-Canadian computer scientist Hinton, who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 2024, was quizzed by BBC presenter Victoria Derbyshire on how accurate Coxon’s claims were. He initially said it was ‘very hard to estimate’ if the software could destroy all human life by 2036, and warned engineers should be ‘cautious’.
But, much to Victoria Derbyshire’s astonishment, 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 veteran presenter then asked Hinton: “You just said that 10 percent doesn’t seem an unreasonable estimate that AI could k!ll all humans.”
His one-word answer initially left her speechless. “Yes,” he replied.
After a pause, Ms Derbyshire exclaimed: “Wow. Oh my God.” She then pressed the scientist, who resigned from a position at Google in 2023 to allow him to sound the alarm about AI’s progress, on how the software can end thousands of years of human society.
Chillingly, he replied: “If it’s much smarter than us there are so many ways I do not think it’s worth speculating.”
Pressed again, he went further: “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.”
It is not the first time Hinton has produced similar warnings, first sounding the alarm over AI’s military potential shortly after he left Google.
