American Geoffrey Hinton and British-Canadian John Hopfield won the Nobel physics prize on Tuesday for their pioneering work on the foundations of artificial intelligence, with both sounding the alarm over the technology they helped bring to life.
The pair’s research on neural networks in the 1980s paved the way for today’s deep-learning systems that promise to revolutionise society but have also raised apocalyptic fears.
“In the same circumstances, I would do the same again, but I am worried that the overall consequence of this might be systems more intelligent than us that eventually take control,” Hinton, 76, told reporters after the announcement.
Hinton, known as “the Godfather of AI”, raised eyebrows in 2023 when he quit his job at Google to warn of the “profound risks to society and humanity” of the technology.
In March last year, when asked whether AI could wipe out humanity, Hinton replied: “It’s not inconceivable.”
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