Geoffrey Hinton or A.I. takes over or Maternal Instinct

14 Oct, 2025

Counting the days to see Geoffrey Hinton in person at Who’s Afraid of A.I.

I watched Hinto's last interview with Katie Couric, and at times I felt myself in between: not knowing if I was experiencing a moment of small epiphanies or small hallucinations or small reliefs, pleasures, despairs. Maybe that was all a little joke.

Geoffrey Hinton has this elegant and direct manner to explain many subjects — from math concepts, plumber’s work, and how A.I. “will take over.” And even when he is apocalyptical, he is calm and smiley. I don’t know why Katie Couric didn’t ask him to be more explicit on how it would be like — this operation, including logistics — on how A.I. will take over.

Katie, at some point, started to ask him questions based more on her personal curiosities — for example, what professions will be replaced — and they went from interviewer, screenwriter, historian, and etc. (The plumber appears here at this part.)

Hinton claims AI will be better at anything including, apparently, being human. He said that research shows, for example, that if patients are asked if they felt better assisted by doctors or A.I., they will say A.I. A.I. can be more empathetic (you know this from your convo with ChatGPT).

(If we start going dystopian about LLM, I would say that Claude’s personality causes me annoyance, and I almost went to tell ChatGPT what Claude told me.)

Putting in mind that each word produced by LLM is a set of numbers using the backpropagation equation, all this convo really doesn’t have any meaning: it just happens that I am a fool still using regular alphabet.

But..the life of a fool then must be an extraordinary one. Keeping in mind that the mythologies of a fool are not a less important one: The Fool symbolizes new beginnings, adventure, and unlimited potential.

So why not let A.I. be the smart one? I play the fool while I can, creating in the intersections of my body, instincts, and dreams.

And to write about instinct is quite amazing. Ha! At the end of the interview, Hinton said that countries will need to get together to regulate an A.I. (he left Google with this mission) and, going further, he is more optimistic now because, see this: if we build A.I. that can behave with maternal instinct then we will be safe.

Hinton said:

“There is a way that we can coexist with things that are more smart and more powerful than ourselves that we built. Because we are building them as well as making them very intelligent, we can try to build something like a maternal instinct.

So, like I said earlier, the only example I know of a much more intelligent thing being controlled by a much less intelligent thing is a baby controlling a mother. And the baby can control the mother because a lot of things that evolution wired into the mother — the mother can’t bear the baby crying. The mother really, really, really wants that baby to succeed and will do more or less anything she can to make her baby succeed.

We want A.I. to be like that. So the leaders of tech companies are all thinking in terms of us being the boss and A.I. being the submissive assistant — something very smart, but we are in charge, and it’s our assistant if we want. We’re the boss. But that’s how they think. That’s not feasible, I think, for a super powerful superintelligence.

What is feasible is for it to be the mother and us to be the baby. And even though it can rewrite its own code if it wants to, it won’t. If you took a mother and said, ‘Would you like to turn off your maternal instinct?’ most mothers would say no, because they’d realize if I did that, the baby would die, and I don’t want my baby to die. So I think that’s the ray of hope that I hadn’t seen till quite recently.”

Oh, oh!!

What I need to think further is: do only mothers have this maternal instinct? And what is an instinct made of, pure biology, or also culture? If you go back to biology texts from the past, you will see sperm and ovaries explained through male and female characteristics (see “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male–Female Roles” by Emily Martin). There is instinct and also lots of storytelling about instinct. Does this mean mothers who’ve never been paid for their labor at home, mothers whose histories have vanished, mother separated from their children, will now teach the machine selfless practices such as sharing is caring?

(btw, Hinton himself is not a mother)

I myself, at this moment, a fool.