These are concerning times for those who are worried about the future of the world, and when not wrangling with the notion of World War III, climate change wiping us all out, or being eradicated by a giant asteroid, there's also the threat that artificial intelligence will go rogue and we'll end up in some Terminator-style apocalypse.
There are obvious fears about what an unchained AI can do, and with President Donald Trump signing a $500 billion deal to catapult it forward, many experts say we're right to be worried.
Apparently, it's not the POTUS we need to be worried about when it comes to AI, but his former 'First Buddy'. As well as being the world's richest man, Elon Musk has his hand in all sorts of technological ventures like Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and xAI. He's already shown how Tesla is moving away from electric vehicles to focus on the futuristic Optimus robots, while xAI has come under fire for apparently becoming fixated on 'white genocide'. Now, the 'Godfather of AI' has spoken out about the tech billionaire, with Geoffrey Hinton foreshadowing Musk's nefarious role in the 2028 presidential election.
Advert
Speaking on Steven Bartlett's The Diary of a CEO podcast, Hinton says he thinks that Musk's role as the former head of the Department of Government Efficiency was to gather data on the electorate.
Discussing what he thinks is going on, Hinton explained: "If you wanted to use AI to corrupt elections, a very effective thing is to be able to do targeted political advertisements where you know a lot about the person.
“So, anybody who wanted to use AI for corrupting elections would try and get as much data as they could about everybody in the electorate.”
Turning his attention to Musk, Hinton continued: "With that in mind, it's a bit worrying what Musk is doing at present in the States, going in and insisting on getting access to all these things that were very carefully siloed.
"The claim is it's to make things more efficient, but it's exactly what you would want if you intended to corrupt the next election."
Saying that you'd have information on everything from how much people earn to where they live, Hinton maintains that it would be easy to 'manipulate' people. He goes on to reiterate that by turning off a lot of the security controls, it could be possible for Musk to have taken all of his data and fed it into his own models.
As for what he thinks of the tech billionaire, Hinton later referred to OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever and said: "He has a good moral compass, he's not like someone like Musk who has no moral compass."
Hinton concludes that while Musk has done some really great things like pushing electric vehicles and providing Starlink technology to Ukraine during the war with Russia, "He's also done some really bad things."
It sounds like the Godfather of AI is no fan of Elon Musk, but hopefully, his predictions about election corruption won't come to pass.