The British-Canadian computer scientist dubbed the'Godfather of AI' has shortened the odds of artificial intelligence (AI) wiping out humans over the next 30 years, warning the technology could one day'take control'. Professor Geoffrey Hinton said we need to be'very careful' and'very thoughtful' about the development of AI which he says is'potentially very dangerous'. He had previously said there was a 10 per cent chance of the technology causing the extinction of the human race - but now predicts that figure to be '10 per cent to 20 per cent', because of the rapid pace at which AI is developing. Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Professor Hinton said: 'You see, we've never had to deal with things more intelligent than ourselves before.' He continued: 'And how many examples do you know of a more intelligent thing being controlled by a less intelligent thing?

Forging ahead with technological advances in society without the input of the humanities leads to situations like the plight of the Uighurs in China or "obscene" military uses for technology, according to a groundbreaking scientist. Geoffrey Hinton (pictured below), seen as one of the pioneers of modern artificial intelligence for his decades-old research on deep learning and neural networks, also told Times Higher Education's World Academic Summit – held online in partnership with the University of Toronto on 1-3 September – that he was "very happy" if universities use big science grants to help fund the humanities. The distinguished emeritus professor at Toronto – who was hired part time by Google in 2013 and is now a vice-president and engineering fellow at the tech giant – said that although technology "allows us to create lots of goodies", other disciplines were vital for helping society determine how to use such advances. "How those goodies get distributed and used depends on things that aren't technology, that depends on social decisions about how we should divide things up and those are really important," he said in an interview with THE editor John Gill. A "technologically advanced society but without the humanities" then leads to problems, he said, adding that "modern China is a bit like that; you get things like the Uighurs in western China", subjected to high-tech and intensive surveillance by the Chinese state.

What was your background prior to entering this challenge? We are a team of computer science and statistics academics. Ruslan Salakhutdinov and Geoff Hinton are professors at the University of Toronto. George Dahl and Navdeep Jaitly are Ph.D. students working with Professor Hinton. Christopher "Gomez" Jordan-Squire is in the mathematics Ph.D. program at the University of Washington, studying (constrained) optimization applied to statistics and machine learning.