A somewhat bemusing interview took place between Victoria Derbyshire and Geoffrey Hinton last week on Newsnight. Hinton, an eminent computer scientist who has won both a Nobel prize and a Turing award, told Derbyshire that a ten per cent chance of human extinction at the hands of AI by the end of this decade ‘seems not an unreasonable estimate to me’, leaving Derbyshire almost speechless.

It is strange that a senior broadcaster could have made it as late as September 2026 without encountering Hinton’s perspective, which is not particularly controversial among either AI researchers or safety advocates. Hinton even quit his position with Google in 2023 so that he could voice his concerns about AI risk publicly. Why has it taken three years for Derbyshire – who is paid over £250,000 by the BBC – to notice?

Here is one way that Derbyshire could have pushed back on Hinton, if she’d been doing her job properly: ask him about some of his previous bold predictions. In 2016, Hinton famously stated that ‘people should stop training........

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