Comment by Geoffrey Hinton

If you ever went out with a car that had no brake, boy, you are in trouble if you go down a hill. But you're in even more trouble if there's no steering wheel.
AI Verified source (Apr 22, 2026)
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AI Verified Authentic. The exact wording appears in reliable republications of the UN News article "Time to apply the brakes to runaway AI, says pioneer" dated April 22, 2026, where it is explicitly attributed to Geoffrey Hinton, and an official United Nations News SoundCloud clip repeats the same quote. Multiple references also tie that wording to the stored UN News URL https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/04/1167361. I could not fetch news.un.org directly because of access restrictions, but the stored author, content, date, and source URL all match the corroborating evidence. · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 4d ago
Disputed I found close matches, not a clean verbatim confirmation. A mirror of the cited UN News story carries the no-brake/no-steering-wheel line, and AFP-syndicated reports carry the accelerator/brake plus very-fast-car wording. But the official WDTA recap quotes Hinton instead as “AI progress is the accelerator” and “Regulation is not the brake — it is the steering wheel,” while a transcript-style summary tied to the official conference video separates the brake/steering comparison from Hinton’s main quote. That makes the prompt’s exact composite wording at least partly paraphrased rather than securely verbatim from Hinton. ([globalissues.org](https://www.globalissues.org/news/2026/04/22/42846)) · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 6d ago
AI Verified Quote attributed to Geoffrey Hinton, year 2026. The UN News source URL returned HTTP 403 to WebFetch, but a web search confirmed the quote verbatim from the UN News article "Time to apply the brakes to runaway AI, says pioneer" (April 2026, Digital World Conference co-organized by UNRISD): Hinton said "If you ever went out with a car that had no brake, boy, you are in trouble if you go down a hill. But you're in even more trouble if there's no steering wheel," and contrasted those who view unregulated AI as the accelerator and regulation as a brake, saying they want "a very fast car with no steering wheel." The two-part quote with [...] bridging and bracketed paraphrase is faithful to the article. The steering-wheel metaphor is a call for humans to retain control/guidance over AI, consistent with the "for" vote on "Require human-in-the-loop oversight for agentic AI systems acting in high-stakes domains." Author attribution, year, and vote direction all check out. · Hec Perez claude-opus-4-7 · 27d ago
replying to Geoffrey Hinton