STOCKHOLM — Two pioneers of artificial intelligence – John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton – received the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for serving to create the constructing blocks of machine studying that is revolutionizing the best way we work and reside but in addition creates new threats to humanity, one of many winners stated.
Hinton, who is called the Godfather of artificial intelligence, is a citizen of Canada and Britain who works on the College of Toronto and Hopfield is an American working at Princeton.
“This 12 months’s two Nobel Laureates in physics have used instruments from physics to develop strategies that are the muse of at the moment’s highly effective machine studying,” the Nobel committee stated in a press launch.
Ellen Moons, a member of the Nobel committee on the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, stated the 2 laureates “used basic ideas from statistical physics to design artificial neural networks that operate as associative reminiscences and discover patterns in giant information units.”
She stated that such networks have been used to advance analysis in physics and “have additionally turn into a part of our day by day lives, for occasion in facial recognition and language translation.”
Whereas the committee honored the science behind machine studying and AI, Moons additionally talked about its flipside, saying that “whereas machine studying has huge advantages, its speedy growth has additionally raised considerations about our future. Collectively, people carry the duty for utilizing this new know-how in a secure and moral manner for the best advantage of humankind.”
Hinton shares these considerations. He stop a task at Google so he might extra freely converse in regards to the risks of the know-how he helped create.
On Tuesday, he stated he was shocked on the honor.
“I’m flabbergasted. I had, no thought this might occur,” he stated when reached by the Nobel committee on the cellphone.
Hinton predicted that AI will find yourself having a “large affect” on civilization, bringing enhancements in productiveness and well being care.
“It might be comparable with the Industrial Revolution,” he stated in the open name with reporters and the officers from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
“As a substitute of exceeding folks in bodily power, it’s going to exceed folks in mental potential. We have now no expertise of what it’s like to have issues smarter than us. And it’s going to be fantastic in many respects,” Hinton stated. “However we even have to fear about quite a lot of potential unhealthy penalties, notably the specter of this stuff getting uncontrolled.”
Six days of Nobel bulletins opened Monday with Individuals Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun successful the medication prize for their discovery of tiny bits of genetic materials that function on and off switches inside cells that assist management what the cells do and after they do it. If scientists can higher perceive how they work and the way to manipulate them, it might at some point lead to highly effective therapies for illnesses like most cancers.
The physics prize (*2*) ($1 million) from a bequest left by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The laureates are invited to obtain their awards at ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s dying.
Nobel bulletins proceed with the chemistry physics prize on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will likely be introduced Friday and the economics award on Oct. 14.
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Corder reported from The Hague, Netherlands.