Independent US Senator Bernie Sanders on Tuesday voiced his concerns on unregulated artificial intelligence with Geoffrey Hinton, widely considered to be the godfather of the technology.
"This is an issue that will impact everybody's life," Mr Sanders said at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy in Washington, referring to fears of labour disruption, among other concerns.
Mr Hinton said that unlike previous instances of labour disruption, that induced by AI poses completely different challenges.
"This is very different because the people who lose their jobs won't have other jobs to go to if AI gets as smart as people or smarter," he said.
Mr Sanders asked Mr Hinton if he thought that some of the staunchest proponents of unregulated AI, such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Ellison, were concerned about the possibility of massive unemployment.
"They should be but I don't think they are," Mr Hinton said.
"Many of them haven't really absorbed that if the workers don't get paid, there will be nobody to buy their products, and they haven't really thought through the massive social disruption we'll get if we get very high unemployment."
In October, Mr Hinton joined the UK's Prince Harry, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and conservative activist Steve Bannon in signing a petition calling for a ban on on the “reckless development of superintelligence”.
Superintelligence is the hypothetical ability for AI tools to perform highly advanced cognitive functions and develop reasoning skills that would pass those of humans
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