John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton awarded Nobel Prize in physicsOne laureate recognized for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning warns of “possible bad consequences” of artificial intelligence.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2024/10/08/nobel-prize-physics/
The Nobel Prize in physics was awarded Tuesday to two pioneering scientists who laid the groundwork for the revolutionary advances in artificial intelligence, and one of the new laureates wasted no time in warning that those advances potentially pose risks to society.
“We have no experience with what it’s like to have things smarter than us,” Geoffrey Hinton of the University of Toronto said minutes after the announcement that he and John Hopfield of Princeton University had been awarded the physics prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
The academy honored Hinton, a computer scientist, and Hopfield, a physicist, “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.” While the laureates have made waves in computer science, their work relies on physics principles.
Machine learning refers to the development of computer systems that can learn and adapt without being given explicit instructions. The laureates figured out how to create systems that process data similar to how the brain processes information.
Their work has found applications across fields, including astrophysics, medical diagnostics and climate modeling. But while artificial intelligence promises to boost productivity and efficiency in those areas, some researchers — Hinton prominently among them — fear that this new technology could get out of control.
Hinton quit his job as a vice president and engineering fellow at Google last year after a decade at the tech giant. He said he quit because he wanted to be able to share his concerns about the risks of artificial intelligence without worrying what it would mean for his employer.
“One of the ways in which these systems might escape control is by writing their own computer code to modify themselves,” Hinton said in a 2023 interview with CBS News. “That’s something we need to seriously worry about.”
He sounded a similar note on Tuesday, saying the impact of artificial intelligence on civilization would be akin to the industrial revolution — for better or worse.
“It’s going to be wonderful in many respects,” Hinton said, citing improvements in health care as an example. “But we also have to worry about a number of possible bad consequences … I am worried that the overall consequence of this might be systems more intelligent than us that eventually take control.”
Hopfield, 91, and Hinton, 76, were honored for work that began in the early 1980s and continued even when the scientific community became skeptical that neural networks and machine learning would have significant utility, according to the academy.
Hopfield used his knowledge of physics to explore issues in molecular biology and neuroscience. He became fascinated by research on the structure of the brain. That led him to think about the creation of artificial neural networks.
In 1982, he developed what is known as the Hopfield network, which can store and reconstruct patterns and images. The network takes after models of atoms in physics. The Hopfield network tries to reconstruct a corrupted image in a manner similar to how atomic models try to minimize energy of a system. Hinton built on Hopfield’s work a few years later, leveraging a statistical physics technique that can be used to recognize features in images and create new ones.
“They laid the foundation for neural networks and machine learning and what we now commonly call AI,” Olle Eriksson, a physicist at Uppsala University and a member of the Nobel committee for physics, said Tuesday. Hopfield and Hinton are the “founding fathers of this field,” he said.
Hinton said he was “flabbergasted” to be honored with a Nobel. “I was going to get an MRI scan today, but I think I’ll have to cancel that,” he said.
Last year’s physics prize was awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier for developing super short laser pulses that can be used to study how electrons move.
On Wednesday, the academy will announce the Nobel Prize in chemistry.
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