Two artificial intelligence pioneers, John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, received the Nobel Prize in Physics on Oct. 8 for helping create the building blocks of machine learning that will revolutionize the way we work and live but also create new threats to humanity, one of the laureates said.
Mr. Hinton, known as the godfather of artificial intelligence, is a Canadian and British citizen working at the University of Toronto, while Mr. Hopfield is an American working at Princeton.
“This year’s two Nobel physics laureates used the tools of physics to develop methods that are the basis of modern, powerful machine learning,” the Nobel committee said in a press release.
Ellen Muns, a member of the Nobel Committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said the two laureates “used fundamental concepts from statistical physics to develop artificial neural networks that function as associative memories and find patterns in large data sets.”
She said such networks have been used to advance research in physics and “have also become part of our everyday lives, for example in facial recognition and language translation.”
Mr Hinton predicted AI would eventually have a “huge impact” on civilization, leading to improvements in productivity and healthcare.
“It could be compared to the industrial revolution,” he said in an open conversation with journalists and representatives of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
“Instead of humans being superior in physical strength, they will be superior to humans in intellectual ability. We have no experience of what it is like to have things smarter than us. And that will be wonderful in many ways,” Mr. Hinton said. “But we also have to worry about a number of possible bad consequences, especially the threat of these things getting out of control.”
The Nobel committee, which awarded the science behind machine learning and artificial intelligence, also cited concerns about its possible downside. Ms Moons said that while it has “tremendous benefits, its rapid development also raises concerns about our future. Collectively, people have a responsibility to use this new technology in a safe and ethical way for the greatest good of humanity.”
Mr. Hinton shares those concerns. He left Google so he could speak more freely about the dangers of the technology he helped create.
On October 8, he said he was overwhelmed by the honor.
“I'm stunned. I had no idea this would happen,” he said when contacted by telephone from the Nobel committee.
There was no immediate reaction from Mr. Hopfield.
Mr. Hinton in the 1980s helped develop a technique known as backpropagation, which was instrumental in teaching machines to “learn.”
His team at the University of Toronto later amazed their peers by using a neural network and winning the prestigious ImageNet computer vision competition in 2012. This victory spawned a flurry of imitators, marking the beginning of the development of modern artificial intelligence.
Mr Hinton and fellow artificial intelligence scientists Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun won computer science's top prize, the Turing Award, in 2019.
“For a long time, people thought that what the three of us did was nonsense,” Mr. Hinton told The Associated Press in 2019. “They thought we were very misguided, and what we were doing was a very amazing thing for obviously smart people to waste their time on. My message to young researchers: don't be discouraged if everyone tells you that what What you are doing is stupid.”
Mr. Hopfield created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data, the Nobel committee said.
“What continues to interest me most is the question of how intelligence emerges from machines,” Mr. Hopkins said in a video posted online by the Franklin Institute after it presented him with its 2019 physics prize.
Mr. Hinton used Mr. Hopfield's network as the basis for a new network using a different technique known as a Boltzmann machine, which the committee said can learn to recognize characteristic elements in a given type of data.
Six days of Nobel Prize announcements began Monday when Americans Victor Ambrose and Gary Ruvkun received the medical prize for their discovery of tiny pieces of genetic material that serve as 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 effective treatments for diseases such as cancer.
The physics prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million) from a bequest left by the prize's creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. Laureates are invited to receive their awards at a ceremony on December 10, the anniversary of Mr Nobel's death.
Nobel Prize announcements will continue, with the prize for chemistry being awarded on October 9 and literature on October 10. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on October 11, and the economics award will be announced on October 14.
This story was reported by the Associated Press.
