Tiger Cubs

I was just listening to Geoffrey Hinton talking about the future of AI. He used a great analogy from biology, where superhuman danger has lurked around the corner for our entire existence.

The best way to understand it emotionally is we are like somebody who has this really cute tiger cub. Unless you can be very sure that it’s not going to want to kill you when it’s grown up, you should worry.

You may be wondering who Hinton is.

Fair enough. Back in the 80s, he pioneered a new approach to training artificial intelligence systems using neural networks. This became foundational for modern deep learning—instead of giving a system the answer, you let it guess and then let it become gradually better at predicting, until it just works almost every time.

These successes paved the way for what has felt like a very sudden AI revolution over the last couple of years, but these seeds were planted decades ago. After a very successful career at Google, he left the company in 2023 with warnings that these systems may evolve beyond the ability for humans to control them.

I love Hinton’s tiger cub analogy for two reasons. First, this is an incredibly apt analogy for today’s AI. People who are exposed to generative AI for the first time will usually play with the more trivial or cutesy features, noting how much easier it is to do amazing things than it once was.

Second, I was a bit of a Tiger Cub myself.

That’s me—the one not looking in the direction of the camera (but notice how nicely parallel I am with the side of the tank).

I’m with my Tiger Cub Scout friends. According to my research, I may have been a part of the original pilot program for the Tiger Cubs, which was a precursor for the Cub Scouts. I was around 7 years old at the time, and Cub Scouts started at age 9. When the Tiger Cubs was formed, I must have been eager to participate with my friends.

What sorts of activities did we do? Clearly, we went to at least one military base, where we got to climb on top of an M-47 Patton. We probably did lots of outdoor things too, but my memory has conflated all of my Cub Scouts experiences together, not to mention the hours each day we all spent outside.

We certainly learned some of the skills we would need to become effective in the world, but it was mainly just a bunch of us kids figuring out things on our own. We were just hanging out and being cute little tiger cubs.

Unless you can be very sure that it’s not going to want to kill you when it’s grown up, you should worry.

So far, I haven’t tried to kill anyone.