Nobel laureates sound AI alarm
STOCKHOLM—British Canadian Geoffrey Hinton and American John Hopfield won the Nobel physics prize on Tuesday for their pioneering work on the foundations of artificial intelligence (AI), with both sounding the alarm over the technology they helped bring to life.
The pair’s research on neural networks in the 1980s paved the way for today’s deep-learning systems that promise to revolutionize society but have also raised apocalyptic fears.
“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, 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 March last year, when asked whether AI could wipe out humanity, Hinton replied: “It’s not inconceivable.”
The pair were honored “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks,” the jury said.
‘Very unnerving’
Ellen Moons, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, told a press conference that these tools have become part of our daily lives, including in facial recognition and language translation.
While lauding the potential of AI, Moons 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 professor emeritus at Princeton, was spotlighted for having created the “Hopfield network,” also known as associative memory, which can be used to “store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data.”
The physicist joined Hinton in calling for a deeper understanding of modern AI systems to prevent them spiraling out of control, calling recent advances in the technology “very unnerving.”
