Vladimir Putin, of all people, was the first world leader to grasp what a big deal artificial intelligence was for geopolitics. “Whoever becomes the leader,” he warned a group of schoolchildren more than five years ago, “will become the ruler of the world.” What, back then, seemed even to cutting-edge researchers like hyperbole, feels to many like imminent reality in the uncanny age of America’s ChatGPT and China’s Ernie Bot. This is because the geopolitics of great power competition is about to be reshaped by the AI revolution. There will be no research pause, no “pause” to assess its risks that most of the world’s leading researchers are calling for. We are on the brink of an AI arms race with implications for us all.
This is exactly what Geoffrey Hinton, the AI pioneer who recently resigned from Google, wants to prevent. Dubbed “the godfather of AI”, the British-Canadian researcher believes these models are only a few years away from outstriping their human creators, will soon be exceptionally good at manipulating them, and if they were to be programmed with the ability to set their own goals would quickly realise that seizing as much control over human society as possible was a rational way to achieve it.
