A British scientist dubbed the ‘godfather of AI’ has been honoured with a Nobel Prize in Physics, but warned of the “existential risk” it posed if technology gets “out of control”.
Professor Geoffrey Hinton, born in the UK and a professor at the University of Toronto in Canada, said he was extremely surprised to be jointly-awarded the gong.
The AI maestro accepted it, but offered a stark warning too, saying he was worried about the existential risk it posed to humans.
He shared the prestigious award with John J. Hopfield, an American professor at Princeton, who invented a network that uses a method for saving and recreating patterns, known as the Hopfield network.
Hilton was recognised for having created a method that can autonomously find properties in data, and allowing for the performance of tasks such as identifying specific elements in pictures.
He used the Hopfield network as the foundation for a new network that uses a different method: the Boltzmann machine, which can learn to recognise characteristic elements in a given type of data.
He has built upon this work, helping initiate the current explosive development of machine learning.
‘How will we keep control?’
Sharing the fund worth 11m Swedish kronor (£810,000), Hinton told the Nobel Prize organisation, in an audio clip released today, said AI will give society huge benefits.
In areas such as healthcare it will make it “more efficient” with “huge improvements in productivity”.
He warned however that there was “a number of possible bad consequences, particularly the threat of these things getting out of control”.
Hinton added that he “worried that the overall consequence of this might be systems more intelligent than us that eventually take control”.
Asked what can done about it, he contrasted the threat of AI to climate change.
He said it is “different from climate change. With climate change everybody knows what needs to be done we need to stop burning carbon.
It’s just a question of the political will to do that and large companies making big profits not being willing to do that.
With AI, he said “we’re dealing with something where we have much less idea of what’s going to happen and what to do about it.
“So I wish I had a sort of simple recipe that if you do this everything’s going to be okay, but I don’t, in particular, with respect to the existential threat of these things getting out of control and taking over.”
He added that we’re at a “point in history where in the next few years we need to figure out if there’s a way to deal with that threat.
“So I think it’s very important right now for people to be working on the issue of how will we keep control, we need to put a lot of research effort into it.”
Hinton suggested that “one thing governments can do is force the big companies to spend a lot more of their resources on safety research, so that for example, companies like Open AI can’t just put safety research on the back burner.”
Commenting on winning the prize, he said “I I had no idea I’d even be nominated for the Nobel Prize in physics. I was extremely surprised”.
He added, that he was “in a cheap hotel in California that does not have an internet connection and does not have a very good phone connection.
“I was going to get an MRI scan today, but I think I’ll have to cancel that.
“The laureates’ work has already been of the greatest benefit. In physics we use artificial neural networks in a vast range of areas, such as developing new materials with specific properties,” says Ellen Moons, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics.