AI 'godfather' Geoffrey Hinton says AI will one day unite nations against a common existential threat

• AI advances have sparked a new global race for military dominance.
• Geoffrey Hinton said that, right now, countries are working in secret to gain an advantage.
• That will change once AI becomes so intelligent it presents an existential threat, he said.

The rapid advances in AI have triggered an international race for military dominance.

Major powers are quietly integrating AI into their militaries to gain a strategic edge. However, this could change once AI becomes advanced enough to pose an existential threat to humanity, AI "godfather" and Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton says.

"On risks like lethal autonomous weapons, countries will not collaborate," Hinton said in a seminar at the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences last week. "All of the major countries that supply arms, Russia, the United States, China, Britain, Israel, and possibly Sweden, are busy making autonomous lethal weapons, and they're not gonna be slowed down, they're not gonna regulate themselves, and they're not gonna collaborate."

However, Hinton believes that will change when it becomes necessary for the human race to fight the potential threat posed by a super-intelligent form of AI.

"When these things are smarter than us — which almost all the researchers I know believe they will be, we just differ on how soon, whether it's like in five years or in 30 years — will they take over and is there anything we can do to prevent that from happening since we make them? We'll get collaboration on that because all of the countries don't want that to happen."

"The Chinese Communist Party does not want to lose power to AI," he added. They want to hold on to it."

Hinton said this collaboration could resemble the Cold War, when Russia and the United States — despite being enemies — shared a common goal to avoid nuclear war.

Citing similar concerns, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has called on world leaders to establish an "international agency" that examines the most powerful AI models and ensures "reasonable safety testing."

"I think there will come a time in the not-so-distant future, like we're not talking decades and decades from now, where frontier AI systems are capable of causing significant global harm," Altman said on the All-In podcast in May.

According to a report by Goldman Sachs, global investment in AI is expected to hit $200 billion by 2025, with the United States and China leading the military arms race.

The United States and China are already beginning to collaborate on existential threats related to AI. In November, at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit, President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping agreed that humans, not AI, should make decisions regarding the use of nuclear technology.