Co-winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, Canadian-British computer scientist and cognitive psychologist Geoffrey Hinton speaks at a new conference at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden, December 7.JONATHAN NACKSTRAND/AFP/Getty Images
In Sweden’s icy capital, certain rituals herald the approach of a new Nobel Prize ceremony.
Receptions, conferences and tuxedo fittings are on offer, respecting more than a century of tradition. But in one respect, Tuesday’s iconic celebration of intellectual achievement will be different from previous years.
For the first time, four Nobel Prize winners, including Canadian Geoffrey Hinton, are honored for their work directly linked to artificial intelligence.
If anyone still needed a sign that AI has arrived, here it is. The technology that transforms the way we work, learn and communicate has reached the highest level of scientific recognition.
And the world is celebrating, even with worried looks.
The ambivalence was evident on Saturday when Dr Hinton, co-winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in physics, spoke to journalists alongside winners of the chemistry and economics prizes.
The first question – asked only of Dr Hinton – was whether he regretted his achievement.
Dr. Hinton, professor emeritus at the University of Toronto and nicknamed “the godfather of AI,” explained that he had no feeling he had done anything wrong in helping lay the foundations of the current AI revolution more than 40 years ago. The consequences of his research were unknown then and will remain so for decades.
However, he added, AI is now developing so much faster than expected that some of these consequences have become a major concern. At this rate, he says, within five to twenty years we could be the birth of a “superintelligence,” an AI capable of surpassing humans.
“I wish I had thought about safety sooner,” he said.
Dr. Hinton is well known for expressing his reservations about AI, which prompted him to leave his position at Google in 2023. When his Nobel Prize was announced in October, he told the Globe and Mail that he hoped the award would give him a bigger platform. to talk about the risks of AI.
It certainly happened.
This week, Dr. Hinton is attracting more than the usual attention for a Nobel laureate in a city full of them. In addition to being the center of press conferences and panels, his every step is followed by a film crew filming a documentary about his life. The irony is that Dr. Hinton is associated with a technical advancement so profound that it has been repeatedly compared to fire or the industrial revolution, but its use could ultimately threaten social stability and perhaps humanity herself.
Canada has had Nobel Prize winners before, but never this many.
For Dr. Hinton, it’s a world away from the 1980s, when he began working on neural networks – the interconnected programming structures that are at the heart of today’s learning algorithms. At the time, he built on previous research at the intersection of physics, computer science, and neuroscience, including that conducted by fellow physics prize winner John Hopfield of Princeton University. But he could hardly have imagined how far neural networks would go, or what they would achieve in his own lifetime.
To put things into perspective, Dr. Hinton pointed out that the progress he was a part of would certainly have been made by others in his absence. “I think if I hadn’t done this research, it would maybe delay what’s happening now by a few weeks,” he said.
Maybe that’s true. But in this universe, it is Dr. Hinton who finds himself in the role of prophet and guide, explaining why society must work to ensure that AI is developed for “the greatest benefit of humanity”, as said Alfred Nobel in the guidelines for his prize.
Exactly how to achieve this is not very clear.
“It’s a complex question,” said Demis Hassabis, head of DeepMind Technologies and co-winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry. “I think it’s not just a technology issue, but it’s something that the international community needs to come together on.”
The challenge is that AI is a “dual-purpose technology,” he said. It can cause harm as easily as it can improve human life.
It was the first possibility that brought this year’s economics laureates to the debate, including Daron Acemoglu, an MIT professor whose Nobel Prize-winning work focuses on how societal institutions can drive outcomes. radically different for economies and for individuals. One of the key characteristics of more successful societies is inclusion, something that AI can undermine because its benefits are unequal.
From left to right, Secretary General of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Hans Ellegren, winners of the 2024 Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, Turkish-American Daron Acemoglu, the Anglo-Americans Simon Johnson and James Robinson, winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John M Jumper and winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics Computer scientist British-Canadian and cognitive psychologist Geoffrey E Hinton.JONATHAN NACKSTRAND/AFP/Getty Images
“AI promises to be a disruptive change, for better and for worse, so there is a risk that it will open up many gaps,” Dr Acemoglu said.
In the good column, scientists expressed real enthusiasm about the use of AI in research.
“I think we are at the dawn of a new golden age of discoveries aided and fueled by some of these tools,” Dr. Hassabis said.
His own Nobel offers such an example. With his colleague Jonathan Jumper, he received a share of the chemistry prize for having developed AlphaFold2, an algorithm based on the same type of neural networks developed by Dr. Hinton and capable of predicting the structure of a protein from its genetic sequence . This is a key step toward developing protein-based therapies to prevent disease.
Dr. Jumper, who will receive his Nobel before turning 40 next year, exemplifies a generation of researchers who are now seeking to use AI optimally.
Although they will share the same stage this week, more than half a century separates him from Dr. Hopfield, who on Sunday called the mystery of how the mind emerges from the brain “the most profound question posed by our humanity”.
Between them is Dr. Hinton, both participant and witness to the dizzying acceleration that AI has experienced.
This week could end with the tuxedos returning to their closets. But if Canada’s latest Nobel laureate is right, a burgeoning presence that could be a future boon or an obstacle to humanity’s best interests will lead nowhere.