Physicists who Received Nobel Prize for their Work in AI Warn Against their own Creation

Nobel Prize Guy

From phys.org today:

A US scientist who won the 2024 Nobel physics prize for his pioneering work on artificial intelligence said Tuesday he found recent advances in the technology "very unnerving" and warned of possible catastrophe if not kept in check.

John Hopfield, the 91-year-old professor emeritus at Princeton, joined his 76-year-old co-winner, Geoffrey Hinton (professor emeritus at the University of Toronto) in calling for a "deeper understanding of the inner workings of deep-learning systems to prevent them from spiraling out of control."

Hopfield was honored for devising the "Hopfield network"—a theoretical model demonstrating how an artificial neural network can mimic the way biological brains store and retrieve memories.

His model was improved upon by British-Canadian Hinton, often dubbed the "Godfather of AI," whose "Boltzmann machine" introduced the element of randomness, paving the way for modern AI applications such as image generators.

Hinton himself emerged last year as a poster child for AI doomsayers…

"If you look around, there are very few examples of more intelligent things being controlled by less intelligent things, which makes you wonder whether when AI gets smarter than us, it's going to take over control,"

Hopfield in his acceptance speech even cited the civilizational-ending concept of "ice-nine" by SF writer Kurt Vonnegut in his 1963 novel "Cat's Cradle" as a metaphor for the potentially catastrophic consequences of a new technology evolving far faster than our collective ability to comprehend it.  

Definitely food for thought -- but is anyone in authority really listening at this point?