Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, widely referred to as the "Godfather of AI," told the BBC's Newsnight that a 10% chance of artificial intelligence killing all humans within a decade did not seem an unreasonable estimate.
Asked by presenter Victoria Derbyshire whether he believed there was a "greater than 10% chance that AI could kill all humans" within a decade, Hinton said the question was inherently difficult to answer.
"We've never created beings that may soon be smarter than us. We don't know what's going to happen. We should obviously be cautious," he said, adding that while "nobody knows how to estimate it," he believed "a 10% chance seems not an unreasonable estimate."
When Derbyshire pressed him, restating that he had just called the 10% figure "not unreasonable," Hinton simply replied, "Yes."
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Asked how AI could bring about human extinction, Hinton said it would not even need to act in the physical world to cause devastation.
"It'll be able to cause complete chaos just by talking to people, but it will also be able to design very nasty viruses, biological viruses, as well as computer viruses. It could do devastating cyber attacks," he said, adding that there were "countless other ways it could get rid of us if it wanted to."
The interview followed comments by Jacob Coxon, a researcher who resigned from AI company Anthropic on 8 September, stating publicly that he believed his employer and rival OpenAI were not "acting responsibly" and that AI could "kill us all" by the end of the decade.
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Anthropic's alignment science lead, Evan Hubinger, responded on X that Coxon was "correct" and that the company did not yet have a plan to solve AI alignment for superintelligent systems.
Hinton, who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on machine learning, has repeatedly warned about the risks of advanced AI since leaving Google in 2023, including its potential military applications and the possibility of humans losing control over increasingly capable systems.
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