AI is feared to be apocalyptic or touted as world-changing – maybe it's neither

What if AI doesn't fundamentally reshape civilisation? This week, I spoke to Geoffrey Hinton, the English psychologist-turned-computer scientist whose work on neural networks in the 1980s set the stage for the explosion in AI capabilities over the last decade. Hinton wanted to speak to deliver a message to the world: he is afraid of the technology he helped create. You need to imagine something more intelligent than us by the same difference that we're more intelligent than a frog. And it's going to learn from the web, it's going to have read every single book that's ever been written on how to manipulate people, and also seen it in practice." He now thinks the crunch time will come in the next five to 20 years, he says. And I still wouldn't rule out 100 years – it's just that my confidence that this wasn't coming for quite a while has been shaken by the realisation that biological intelligence and digital intelligence are very different, and digital intelligence is probably much better."