Why AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton is now scared of the tech he helped build

Welcome back to What’s Next in Tech. In this edition, delve into a new, in-depth interview with one of the godfathers of AI to find out why, after a career spent advancing the field, he’s now scared of the tech he helped usher in. Then, meet the people who use Notion, a work productivity app, to organize their personal lives. Plus, explore the flawed logic of rushing out extreme climate solutions like solar geoengineering and methane destruction.

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Geoffrey Hinton says he thinks that AI will one day be more intelligent than humans.

Geoffrey Hinton is a pioneer of deep learning who helped develop some of the most important techniques at the heart of modern artificial intelligence. But after a decade at Google, he’s stepping down to focus on new concerns he now has about AI.??

Stunned by the capabilities of new large language models like GPT-4, Hinton wants to raise public awareness of the serious risks that he now believes may accompany the technology he helped usher in.

MIT Technology Review’s senior AI editor, Will Douglas Heaven, sat down with Hinton at his north London home just four days before the bombshell announcement of his departure. Hinton explained his belief that machines are on track to be a lot smarter than he thought they’d be—and why he’s scared about how that might play out. Read the story.

Hear from Geoffrey Hinton tomorrow at EmTech Digital, MIT Technology Review’s signature AI conference. Register now to tune into his session virtually or in-person.?

Meet the people who use Notion to plan their whole lives

Joshua Bergen is a very productive person. His secret is the workplace app Notion. Bergen, a product manager living in Vancouver, uses it to plan trips abroad, with notes and timelines. He uses it to curate lists of the movies and TV shows he’s watched, and records what he thought of them. It’s also a handy way to keep tabs on his 3D-printing projects, map snowboarding runs, and quickly update his cute list of the funny things his kid has said.?

Bergen is one of a growing number of people using Notion, software intended for work, to organize their personal lives. They’re using it in a myriad of different ways, from tracking their meditation habits and weekly schedules to logging their water intake and sharing grocery lists.??

So why has a platform built to accommodate “better, faster work” struck such a chord when there are countless other planning apps out there? Read the story.

The flawed logic of rushing out extreme climate solutions

Early last year, entrepreneur Luke Iseman says, he released a pair of sulfur dioxide-filled weather balloons from Mexico’s Baja California peninsula in the hope that they’d burst miles above Earth.

It was a trivial act in itself, effectively a tiny, DIY act of solar geoengineering, the controversial proposal that the world could counteract climate change by releasing particles that reflect more sunlight back into space.

Entrepreneurs like Iseman invoke the stark dangers of climate change to explain why they do what they do—even if they don’t know how effective their interventions are. But experts say that urgency doesn’t create a social license to ignore the underlying dangers or leapfrog the scientific process. Read the story.

Sign up for The Spark, our weekly climate newsletter, to get more stories like this in your inbox every Wednesday.

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Images: Linda Nylind / eyevine via Redux; Stephanie Arnett/MITTR; Stephanie Arnett/MITTR | Envato