American Scientist, Geoffrey Hinton and British-Canadian John Hopfield have warned the advancement of technology and the rapid growth of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the future of the human society is at risk
The duo sounded the alarm on Tuesday, after winning the Nobel physics prize for their pioneering work on the foundations of AI, a technology they helped bring to life through their research on neural networks in the 1980s paving the way for today’s advancements, which is now feared to be a threat to humanity.
They were honoured “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks,” the jury said.
Hinton, known as “the Godfather of AI”, raised eyebrows in 2023 when he quit his job at Google to warn of the “profound risks to society and humanity” of the technology.
“In the same circumstances, I would do the same again, but I am worried that the overall consequence of this might be systems more intelligent than us that eventually take control,” Hinton, 76, told reporters after the announcement.
Hinton said he was an avid user of AI tools such as ChatGPT, and said he believed the technology will have “a huge influence”.
“It will be comparable with the industrial revolution. But instead of exceeding people in physical strength, it’s going to exceed people in intellectual ability,” Hinton said.
Ellen Moons, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, speaking to journalists, lauded AI for its contributions to society, as it has made a lot of things easier and has massive potential to do much more.
She however noted that “its rapid development has also raised concerns about our future collectively.”
“Humans carry the responsibility for using this new technology in a safe and ethical way,” she said.
Hopfield, a Caltech professor emeritus, was given the award alongside Hinton, “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks,” according to the award citation.
The physicist joined Hinton in calling for a deeper understanding of modern AI systems to prevent them spiralling out of control, calling recent advances in the technology “very unnerving”.
“You don’t know that the collective properties you began with are actually the collective properties with all the interactions present, and you don’t therefore know whether some spontaneous but unwanted thing is lying hidden in the works,” the physicist told a gathering at his university via video link.
The jury said Hinton, a 76-year-old professor at the University of Toronto, used the Hopfield network as a foundation for a new network: “the Boltzmann machine”.
Hinton was credited with inventing “a method that can autonomously find properties in data, and so perform tasks such as identifying specific elements in pictures.”
“I’m flabbergasted, I had no idea this would happen,” Hinton told reporters in a phone interview as the laureates were announced in Stockholm.
Artificial Intelligence Risk To Humanity – Nobel Prize Winners is first published on The Whistler Newspaper