The godfather of AI wins the Nobel Prize – but says he regrets the invention

A British scientist known as the “Godfather of AI” has won the Nobel Prize in Physics – but regrets his invention.

Prof. Geoffrey Hinton, who was born in London and studied at the University of Cambridge, shared the honor with Prof. John Hopfield from Princeton University.

The 76-year-old was staying in a “cheap hotel in California” when he received an early morning call informing him of his award, while Chicago-born Prof Hopfield, 91, was staying in a thatched cottage in England.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences recognized her work with “fundamental concepts” in the design of artificial neural networks. Work carried out in the 1980s to invent a method that could independently find properties in data and identify specific elements in images laid the foundation for modern AI to increasingly dominate the world today.

Prof. Hinton is now at the University of Toronto after working at Google for a decade. He stepped down from his position at the tech giant last year to speak more openly about what he believes is the “existential risk” that AI poses to humanity.

The academic, who has previously warned about the risks of AI, said he had some regrets about introducing the technology to the world.

“There are two kinds of regret,” he said. “There's the kind where you feel guilty for doing something you know you shouldn't have done, and then there's the kind of regret where you do something that's beneath you “I would do it again in the same circumstances, but it might not end well.”

“The second regret I have. I would do the same thing again under the same circumstances, but I worry that the overall consequence is that systems smarter than us will eventually take control.

“We have no experience of what it’s like to have things smarter than us.”

He believes the technology will provide better healthcare and lead to “tremendous improvements” in productivity and efficiency.

However, he warns that the technology could also pose a significant risk to humanity.

“I think it will have a big impact (on our civilization),” Prof Hinton said.
“It will be comparable to the industrial revolution. But instead of surpassing humans in physical strength, they will surpass humans in intellectual ability.

“We have to worry about a range of possible dire consequences, particularly the risk of these things getting out of control,” he told the Nobel Committee by telephone on Tuesday.

“Surprised” to win the prize

The news of his victory came “like a bolt from the blue” and left him “stunned,” he said.

Prof. Hinton is now only the second person in history to win a Nobel Prize and the Turing Award, often called the Nobel Prize in Computer Science.
The Nobel Prize is worth 11 million Swedish crowns (£811,000).

“I was going to have an MRI scan today, but I think I have to cancel,” he said.

Adrian Smith, President of the Royal Society, said: “I warmly congratulate Prof Hinton, who has distinguished himself with his work on artificial neural networks.

“He compared the effects of brain damage to the effects of loss in such a network and found striking similarities to human impairments, for example in name recognition and loss in categorization. This could well be the beginning of autonomous intelligent brain-like machines.”