Reportedly upset with military funding of A.I. research in the U.S., Geoffrey Hinton moved to Canada in 1980s. In 2017, he put his name on an open letter to Trudeau that called for an international ban on the weaponization of A.I.
This week, British-Canadian professor Geoffrey Hinton was one of two recipients of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, alongside John Hopfield, for their work on machine learning. Here’s what to know about Hinton, who is often referred to within the industry as the “Godfather of A.I.”
Who is Geoffrey Hinton?
How did he wind up in Canada?
Why is he called The Godfather of A.I.?
But development in the field was slow — until suddenly it wasn’t. He told the New Yorker that he imagined his work might bear fruit in a century. Instead, in just a few years, computers used the vast amount of data available on the Internet to train themselves and become better at transcribing and translating speech, identifying objects, recognizing faces, driving cars, even creating art and poetry.
Is he concerned about the technology he helped create?
Very. “I worry that the overall consequences of this might be systems that are more intelligent than us that might eventually take control,” he told the BBC, echoing the threat posed by Skynet in the Terminator movies.
“Members of the Artificial Intelligence research community exhort the Prime Minister of Canada to join the international call to ban lethal autonomous weapons that remove meaningful human control in the deployment of lethal force,” it said.
Is the Nobel Prize his first major honour?
In Canada alone, he has received the Killam Prize in Engineering in 2012, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Sherbrooke in 2013. In 2018 he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada.
He joins an esteemed list of Canadians who have won the Nobel Prize in physics, including James Peebles (2019; cosmic background radiation), Donna Strickland (2018; laser physics) and Art McDonald (2015, neutrino mass).
Is science in his blood?
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