The more they warn, the less we’ll listen Technology has a momentum all its own. It has a tendency to take us places before we consider whether they are places we need to or ought to go, I wrote here in 2014. Following up on Danielle Allen’s warnings about artificial general intelligence, A.I. pioneer Dr. Geoffrey Hinton gets space in the New York Times to express his concerns: Dr. Hinton said he has quit his job at Google, where he has worked for more than decade and became one of the most respected voices in the field, so he can freely speak out about the risks of A.I. A part of him, he said, now regrets his life’s work. Hinton, “the Godfather of A.I.,” worries what his creation may do when loosed “into the wild,” as the Times’ Cade Metz puts it. Allen signed onto a March open letter with technologists, academics, and others calling for a six-month pause in “the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.” Days later, “19 current and former leaders of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, a 40-year-old academic society, released their own letter warning of the risks of A.I.” Hinton signed neither, reluctant to go public with his concerns until he resigned from Google. Now he has. Dr. Hinton, a 75-year-old British expatriate, is a lifelong academic whose career was driven by his personal convictions about the development and use of A.I. In 1972, as a graduate student at the University of Edinburgh, Dr.…