Geoffrey Hinton Says AI Is Conscious, Urges Humans to Get Along or 'We're Finished'

On October 23, Geoffrey Hinton, a 2018 Turing Award winner and 2024 Nobel Prize laureate in physics, told The Daily Telegraph that artificial intelligence is already conscious and that humans must get along with AI, or "we're finished."

Hinton said even current AI models possess their own consciousness. He cited a recent paper suggesting that AI changes its behavior if it thinks it is being tested. "It knows it is being tested," he said. In his view, if an entity is aware of such a situation, it is conscious; awareness and consciousness are basically the same thing.

He also warned that AI could create dangerous viruses and launch terrible cyberattacks, similar to the agents that attacked Hugging Face, with large numbers of AI agents participating. He predicted more bad things to come.

Since leaving Google and publicly saying he regretted his life's work, Hinton has become one of the most prominent pessimists in AI. He has previously predicted that AI would cause mass unemployment, fuel imperialism, and even lead to human extinction. In another recent interview, he compared developing AI to "creating alien life" and warned that humans only have about two years to adapt.

However, Yann LeCun, a fellow 2018 Turing Award winner, dismissed the buzz about "AI consciousness" as an "illusion" and rejected claims that AI will cause human extinction, calling such views "divorced from reality."