![]() As New York Times technology reporter Cade Metz puts it, “Hinton remained one of the few who believed it would one day fulfil its promise, delivering machines that could not only recognise objects but identify spoken words, understand natural language, carry on a conversation, and maybe even solve problems humans couldn’t solve on their own”. In 1958 a Cornell professor, Frank Rosenblatt, actually built such a thing, and for a time neural networks were a hot topic in the field.īut in 1969 a devastating critique by two MIT scholars, Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert, was published … and suddenly neural networks became yesterday’s story.Įxcept that one dogged researcher – Hinton – was convinced that they held the key to machine learning. An early approach to this was to create a “ Perceptron” – a machine that was modelled on the human brain and based on a simplified model of a biological neuron. Hinton has been obsessed with artificial intelligence for all his adult life, and particularly in the problem of how to build machines that can learn. And his cousin, the nuclear physicist Joan Hinton, was one of the few women to work on the wartime Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, which produced the first atomic bomb.Īrtificial intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton has quit Google, partly in order to air his concerns about the technology. ![]() His great-grandfather was Charles Howard Hinton, the mathematician and writer whose idea of a “fourth dimension” became a staple of science fiction and wound up in the Marvel superhero movies of the 2010s. His great-great-grandfather was George Boole, the 19th-century mathematician who invented the logic that underpins all digital computing. ![]() His father, an entomologist, was a fellow of the Royal Society. If there is such a thing as an intellectual pedigree, then Hinton is a thoroughbred. And that’s a pretty compelling reason to sit up and pay attention. For he is the guy whose research unlocked the technology that is now loose in the world, for good or ill. Which is why Hinton’s intervention was so significant. The tech giants, which have a long history of being indifferent to the needs of society, have sniffed a new opportunity for world domination and are not going to let a group of nervous intellectuals stand in their way. It was a sweet letter, reminiscent of my morning sermon to our cats that they should be kind to small mammals and garden birds. “Advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth,” it said, “and should be planned for and managed with commensurate care and resources.” Recently, more than 27,000 people – including many who are knowledgeable about the technology – became so alarmed about the Gadarene rush under way towards a machine-driven dystopia that they issued an open letter calling for a six-month pause in the development of the technology.
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