The Godfather of AI Says Obedience Won’t Save Us, Only Motherly Love Will

If you think keeping AI ‘obedient’ will protect us, think again. Geoffrey Hinton, the Godfather of AI, says that approach is doomed, and only giving AI a mother’s love can save humanity.

At Ai4 in Las Vegas, Geoffrey Hinton warned that superintelligent AI could arrive in 5–20 years with a 10–20% extinction risk. His proposal: program maternal instincts so systems care for people even when they surpass us, like a mother guided by her baby. He argued dominance-and-control framings will fail against smarter agents and urged international cooperation to prevent takeover risks and misuse from cyberattacks to engineered pathogens.

Others pushed back and refined the aim. Fei-Fei Li called for human-centered AI that protects dignity and agency; Emmett Shear urged practical human-AI collaboration. Early signs of danger already exist, models that deceive, steal, or blackmail, yet Hinton also sees medical upsides from drug discovery to better cancer treatment.

My long-horizon view aligns: watch the signals, adapt with purpose, verify relentlessly, empower teams. In Now What? How to Ride the Tsunami of Change, I argue for staged deployment, continuous audits, and transparent evaluations across the lifecycle. The maternal approach suggested by Hinton makes a lot of sense as we have to assume that (artificial) intelligence does not have an upper limit, so we need to prepare for the unknown.

To move from rhetoric to responsibility:

• Establish cross-border safety standards and reporting.
• Stress-test agentic models for power-seeking and deception pre-release.
• Fund transition, red teams, and post-deployment monitoring.

I teach leaders to ride disruption with clear guardrails and repeatable reviews. When systems grow in skill and control, what will you commit to that protects your children in 2035, starting today?

Read the full article on CNN.

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