A British scientist known as the “Godfather of AI” has won the Nobel Prize for physics – but has regrets about his invention.
Prof Geoffrey Hinton, who was born in London and studied at the University of Cambridge, shared the honour with Prof John Hopfield of Princeton University.
The 76-year-old was staying in a“cheap hotel in California” when he received the early morning phone call informing him of his award, while Chicago-born Prof Hopfield, 91, was in a thatched cottage in England.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences recognised their work using “fundamental concepts” to design artificial neural networks. The work, carried out in the 1980s, which involved inventing a method that can autonomously find properties in data and identify specific elements in pictures, was foundational to the modern AI increasingly dominating the world today.
Prof Hinton is now at the University of Toronto after a decade working at Google. He resigned from his role at the tech giant last year so he could speak out more openly about what he considers the “existential risk” posed to humanity by AI.
The academic, who has previously sounded the alarm over the risks of AI, said that he had some regrets about introducing the technology to the world.
“There’s two kinds of regret,” he said. “There is the kind where you feel guilty because you do something you know you shouldn’t have done, and then there’s regret where you do something you would do again in the same circumstances but it may in the end not turn out well.
“That second regret I have. In the same circumstances I would do the same again but I am worried that the overall consequence of this is that systems more intelligent than us eventually take control.
“We have no experience of what it is like to have things that are smarter than us.”
The technology will, he believes, provide superior healthcare and lead to “huge improvements” in productivity and efficiency.
However, he warns the technology could also pose a significant risk to humanity.
“I think it will have a huge influence [on our civilisation],” Prof Hinton said.
“It will be comparable with the industrial revolution. But instead of exceeding people in physical strength it is going to exceed people in intellectual ability.
“We have to worry about a number of possible bad consequences, particularly the threat of these things getting out of control,” he told the Nobel committee over the phone on Tuesday.
‘Flabbergasted’ to win prize
The news of his victory, he said, came as “a bolt out of the blue”, leaving him “flabbergasted”.
Prof Hinton is now just the second person in history to win a Nobel Prize and the Turing Award, often dubbed the Nobel for computing.
The Nobel prize comes with a share of 11 million Swedish Krona (£811,000).
“I was going to get an MRI scan today, but I think I will have to cancel that,” he said.
Adrian Smith, president of the Royal Society, said: “I offer my warmest congratulations to Prof Hinton who is distinguished for his work on artificial neural nets.
“He has compared the effects of brain damage with effects of losses in such a net, and found striking similarities with human impairment, such as for recognition of names and losses of categorisation. This may well be the start of autonomous intelligent brain-like machines.”