Two Pioneers in Artificial Intelligence Receive Noble Prizes
Two pioneers of artificial intelligence — John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton — won the Nobel Prize in physics for helping create the building blocks of machine learning that is revolutionizing the way we work and live but also creates new threats for humanity.
Hinton, who is known as the godfather of artificial intelligence, is a citizen of Canada and Britain who works at the University of Toronto, and Hopfield is an American who is a professor emeritus at Princeton University.
“These two gentlemen were really the pioneers,” said Nobel physics committee member Mark Pearce.
The artificial neural networks — interconnected computer nodes inspired by neurons in the human brain — the researchers pioneered are used throughout science and medicine and “have also become part of our daily lives,” said Ellen Moons of the Nobel committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Hopfield, 91, created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data.
“When you get systems that are rich enough in complexity and size, they can have properties which you can’t possibly intuit from the elementary particles you put in there,” he said in a press conference convened by Princeton. “You have to say that system contains some new physics.”
He echoed Hinton’s concerns, saying there was something unnerving about the unknown potential and limits of AI.
“One is accustomed to having technologies which are not singularly only good or only bad, but have capabilities in both directions,” he said.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said it awarded the prize to the two men because they used “tools from physics to develop methods that are the foundation of today’s powerful machine learning” that is “revolutionizing science, engineering and daily life.”
The award comes with a prize sum of 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million), which is shared by the two winners.
British-born Hinton, 76, now professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, invented a method that can autonomously find properties in data and carry out tasks such as identifying specific elements in pictures, the academy said.
Asked about the concerns surrounding machine learning and other forms of artificial intelligence, Ellen Moons, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said: “While machine learning has enormous benefits, its rapid development has also raised concerns about our future.
“Collectively, humans carry the responsibility for using this new technology in a safe and ethical way for the greatest benefit of humankind.”
The prizes have been awarded with a few interruptions since 1901. Outside the sometimes controversial choices for peace and literature, physics often makes the biggest splash among the prizes, with the list of past winners featuring scientific superstars such as Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Enrico Fermi.
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