STOCKHOLM– Two pioneers of artificial intelligence – John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton – won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for helping create the building blocks of machine learning that is revolutionizing the way we work and live, but also creating new threats to humanity, said one of the winners. .
Hinton, known as the godfather of artificial intelligence, is a Canadian and British citizen working at the University of Toronto and Hopfield is an American working at Princeton.
“Both of this year’s Nobel Prize winners in physics used tools from physics to develop methods that form the foundation of today’s powerful machine learning,” the Nobel committee said in a press release.
Ellen Moons, a member of the Nobel committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said the two winners “used fundamental concepts from statistical physics to design artificial neural networks that function like associative memories and find patterns in large data sets.
She said such networks have been used to advance physics research and “are also part of our daily lives, for example in facial recognition and language translation.”
While the committee honored the science behind machine learning and AI, Moons also mentioned its downside, saying that “while machine learning has enormous benefits, its rapid development has also raised concerns about our future. Collectively, humans bear responsibility for the use of this new technology. in a safe and ethical manner for the greater benefit of humanity.
Hinton shares these concerns. He left his job at Google so he could speak more freely about the dangers of the technology he helped create.
On Tuesday, he said he was shocked by the honor.
“I’m stunned. I didn’t know this would happen,” he said when reached by telephone by the Nobel committee.
Hinton predicted that AI would eventually have a “huge influence” on civilization, bringing improvements in productivity and healthcare.
“It would be comparable to the industrial revolution,” he said during the open call with journalists and officials at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
“Instead of surpassing people in physical strength, it will surpass people in intellectual capacity. We have no experience of what it means to have things smarter than us. And it’s going to be wonderful in so many ways,” Hinton said. “But we also have to worry about a number of possible adverse consequences, including the risk of these things getting out of control.”
Six days of Nobel announcements opened Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize for their discovery of tiny pieces of genetic material that serve as on/off switches inside cells and help control what cells do and when they do it. If scientists can better understand how they work and how to manipulate them, it could one day lead to powerful treatments for diseases like cancer.
The physics prize carries a cash prize of 11 million Swedish crowns ($1 million) from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The winners are invited to receive their prizes during the ceremonies on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.
The Nobel announcements continue with the chemistry-physics prize on Wednesday and the literature prize on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the economic prize on October 14.
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Corder reported from The Hague, Netherlands.
