STORY: :: Co-winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics
warn of the potential dangers of AI
:: Their contributions to machine learning
paved the way for the AI boom
:: October 8, 2024
:: Geoffrey Hinton, 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics winner
“I’m hoping AI will lead to tremendous benefits, to tremendous increases in productivity, and to a better life for everybody. I’m convinced that it will do that in healthcare. My worry is that it may also lead to bad things and, in particular, when we get things more intelligent than ourselves. No one really knows whether we’re going to be able to control them.”
“Quite a few good researchers believe that sometime in the next 20 years, AI will become more intelligent than us. And we need to think hard about what happens then.”
:: Princeton University
:: John Hopfield, 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics winner
“But I worry about anything which says I’m big, I’m fast, I’m faster than you are, I’m bigger than you are. And I can, I can also run you. Now can you peacefully inhabit with me? I don’t know… I worry.”
Heralded for its revolutionary potential in areas ranging from cutting-edge scientific discovery to more efficient admin, the emerging technology on which the duo worked has also raised fears humankind may soon be outsmarted and outcompeted by its own creation.
Hinton has been widely credited as a godfather of AI and made headlines when he quit his job at Google last year to be able to more easily speak about the dangers of the technology he had pioneered.
Hopfield, 91, a professor emeritus at Princeton University, created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data, said the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the prize.
