Scientist Geoffrey Hinton, widely considered the father of artificial intelligence, has warned of the potential dangers of AI and called for further research, just hours after being announced as co-winner of the prize Nobel Prize in Physics 2024.
Hinton told reporters he was “extremely surprised” to win. He shares the prize with American scientist John Hopfield for discoveries and inventions in the field of machine learning that paved the way for the rise of AI.
Hinton said he has high hopes for AI’s role in productivity, particularly in the healthcare sector. However, he warned that researchers need to find ways to put guardrails on AI. “I worry that it will also lead to negative things, especially when we have beings more intelligent than us. No one really knows if we will be able to control them.”
He explained that today’s top scientists believe that AI will become smarter than humans in the next 20 years and that the industry does not yet know how to avoid the doomsday scenarios associated with it.
“We need to think seriously about what happens then. (…) This is why we urgently need more research. I therefore advocate that our best young researchers – or many of them – work on the AI security Governments should also force large companies to provide the computing facilities they need to achieve this.
Hinton made headlines when he quit his job at Google last year so he could speak more easily about the dangers of the technology he had pioneered.
Nobel Prize physics AI artificial intelligence Geoffrey Hinton
