Artificial intelligence could “take over”: Nobel laureate in physics warns of the consequences

Geoffrey Hinton, this year's Nobel laureate in physics, emphasizes the positive aspects of artificial intelligence – while warning of its negative consequences.

This year's Nobel Prize in Physics went to computer scientist John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, who have spent much of their research careers working on artificial intelligence. At least with the basics for it. The Swedish Academy's citation says the laureates “used tools from physics to develop methods that form the basis of today's powerful machine learning.” For Geoffrey Hinton (University of Toronto), as he told reporters, the award was a real surprise.

Hinton, who answered some other questions, compared the increasing public availability of artificial intelligence to a historical event such as the Industrial Revolution. “Instead of outperforming humans in physical strength, AI will outperform humans in mental abilities,” explained the computer scientist who joined us from California. And this is exactly what poses a challenge to humanity: “We have no experience of what it feels like when things are smarter than us.”

For Hopkins, artificial intelligence brings with it many positive impacts – for example in healthcare or in everyday life. The computer scientist, who mainly uses ChatGPT himself, also worries that “systems smarter than us will eventually take over.”

In their work, Hopfield and Hinton pioneered the development of machine learning through artificial neural networks. Hopfield invented a network, later named after him, capable of storing and reproducing patterns such as images. Hinton developed the so-called Boltzmann machine based on Hopfield's work. Based on the training data, it learns to recognize distinct features in the data.