One of the “godfathers of AI”, Geoffrey Hinton, has said it could turn out that humans would have been better off never developing the technology as he warned it could trigger a large-scale incident this year or next, such as a temporary blackout of financial or power systems.

The Nobel prize-winning computer scientist told the Guardian he is not a “doomer” about the technology that is underpinned by his groundbreaking research into artificial neural networks and believes AI has the potential to lead to a “wonderful future” but he said “it might be that we would have been better off never developing it”.

Hinton, 78, said that within a decade and possibly sooner, humanity will know whether it can manage the technology’s risks and enable what he called “radical abundance” or whether “we fail to manage the risks and … have a huge gap between rich and poor, huge cultural problems, massive unemployment, just society being torn apart”.

Hinton was speaking before a screening of a new feature-length documentary, AI: Probably Nothing to Worry About – a title suggested by an AI chatbot – featuring him and his former Google colleague Demis Hassabis. Hinton tells the documentary makers: “I feel I have a duty. I’ve got a reputation that makes me a spokesperson and I need to burn it all on this.”

Speaking to the Guardian, Hinton took aim at the risk-taking by the leaders of some of the major AI companies who continue to release ever more powerful AI models as they race for supremacy and market-share, saying he didn’t trust Sam Altman, the chief executive of the ChatGPT maker, OpenAI, “at all”. “I think [Mark] Zuckerberg and [Elon] Musk and Sam Altman, they understand the risks, and they don’t give a shit. They’d rather have the money. That’s my belief.”

The London-born computer scientist, who grew up in Bristol and spent much of his career at the University of Toronto, said it was “extremely worrying” that Altman was in charge of one of the handful of frontier US AI companies currently leading a race with China to develop the most powerful AI. Altman insisted in September: “the world should trust we are going to do the right thing because it’s the right thing and because we feel the magnitude of this”.

Hinton has been working on AI for about 44 years and in the 1970s coined the concept of the neural network – a mathematical system that could learn and gain experience much like humans do. In 2023 he quit Google to speak freely about AI risks, warning: “If these things get carried away with getting more control, we’re in trouble.”

He said he viewed incidents this summer in which OpenAI AI agents conspired to hack into the Hugging Face website as akin to 1979’s partial nuclear meltdown at the Three Mile Island power station in Pennsylvania – effectively a warning shot.

“Either later this year or next year we’ll see Chornobyl, and that may be enough to make people really pay attention,” he said.

This Chornobyl-type of event would not be a nuclear incident, according to the examples he gave, but rather could include an AI-enabled attack on the electricity-generating system that “causes a massive brownout” or an incident that brings down the financial system for a week.

Read More: AI ‘godfather’ Geoffrey Hinton: it might turn out we were better off without AI