Posted on 10/15/2024 7:28:01 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
TOCKHOLM (AP) — Two pioneers of artificial intelligence — John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton — won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday 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 working at Princeton.
“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, whose 1982 work laid the groundwork for Hinton's, told The Associated Press, “I continue to be amazed by the impact it has had."
Hinton predicted that AI will end up having a “huge influence” on civilization, bringing improvements in productivity and health care.
“It would be comparable with the Industrial Revolution,” he said in an open call with reporters and officials of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
“We have no experience of what it’s like to have things smarter than us. And it’s going to be wonderful in many respects,” Hinton said.
“But we also have to worry about a number of possible bad consequences, particularly the threat of these things getting out of control.”
Warning of AI risks The Nobel committee also mentioned fears about the possible flipside.
Moons said that while it has "enormous benefits, its rapid development has also raised concerns about our future.”
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
They will be given a protected place of honor by our robotic overlords in the not-to-distant future.
What does this have to do with physics?
ChatGPT will write the acceptance speeches.
Beat me to it.
The machines the AI programs run on are made of physical materials?
There’s no Nobel prize in computer science & mathematics. I think Hopfield is a physicist by a academic training. Maybe not one could agree what was Nobel worthy in physics this year. So there’s a Nobel prize not filled and nature abhors a vacuum.
Anyway John Forbes Nash a mathematician got a Nobel in economics though his contributions to economics were as indirect as these guys contribution to physics.
Maybe Elon Musk will create a Musk Prize for Computer Science.
What does this have to do with physics?
Beat me to it.
The machines the AI programs run on are made of physical materials?
physics, science that deals with the structure of matter and the interactions between the fundamental constituents of the observable universe. In the broadest sense, physics (from the Greek physikos) is concerned with all aspects of nature on both the macroscopic and submicroscopic levels. Its scope of study encompasses not only the behaviour of objects under the action of given forces but also the nature and origin of gravitational, electromagnetic, and nuclear force fields. Its ultimate objective is the formulation of a few comprehensive principles that bring together and explain all such disparate phenomena.
(Read Einstein’s 1926 Britannica essay on space-time.)
Physics is the basic physical science. Until rather recent times physics and natural philosophy were used interchangeably for the science whose aim is the discovery and formulation of the fundamental laws of nature. As the modern sciences developed and became increasingly specialized, physics came to denote that part of physical science not included in astronomy, chemistry, geology, and engineering. Physics plays an important role in all the natural sciences, however, and all such fields have branches in which physical laws and measurements receive special emphasis, bearing such names as astrophysics, geophysics, biophysics, and even psychophysics. Physics can, at base, be defined as the science of matter, motion, and energy. Its laws are typically expressed with economy and precision in the language of mathematics.
Both experiment, the observation of phenomena under conditions that are controlled as precisely as possible, and theory, the formulation of a unified conceptual framework, play essential and complementary roles in the advancement of physics. Physical experiments result in measurements, which are compared with the outcome predicted by theory. A theory that reliably predicts the results of experiments to which it is applicable is said to embody a law of physics. However, a law is always subject to modification, replacement, or restriction to a more limited domain, if a later experiment makes it necessary.
Nobel people don’t know either?
So the answer is.....................politics.
I am content with the fact I will not be here to see how f’ed up the world gets under this new AI scam. It is still a program, written by humans, so it can be made to “think a certain” way and it will never be sentient.
Well played!
I was in the running this year for the award.
I submitted my research on The Physics Of Eating Soup With A Spoon.
When I was young, my Mother told me that you could drown with just a teaspoon of liquid.
Imagine my horror eating soup.
You are intentionally putting a whole soup spoon full of liquid under your nose!
And you’re doing it lots of times!
What if that soup jumped off that spoon and shot up your nose?
You’d be a goner.
Using algorithms and null hypothesis and careful documentation, I proved, without a doubt (OK maybe a little doubt) that soup will not jump off your spoon and shoot up your nose.
Unless, and there’s always an unless, you are eating Thai Live Shrimp Soup.
The shrimp could theoretically jump off the spoon carrying liquid in their little shrimp buckets and shoot up your nose and empty their buckets of warm shrimp bath water into your breathing passage.
I am working on a cure for this to try for The Nobel Prize in medicine.
It involves lasers and Schrödinger’s Cat.
It’s not a conventional program though. It’s a ‘trained neural network’, and yes, the training can introduce bias.
I use ChatGPT almost every day, especially when I need to express things in a written form. I can prompt it on a topic with details, then ask it to ‘compare and contrast’ items, ‘create an outline’, or ‘summarize the details’, etc.. It’s a ridiculously powerful tool. I can do in hours what would have taken a team days to do.
I’d also argue to ‘never say never’. It’s going to become extremely hard to tell what is sentient or not. I think the barrier is coming up with brand new ideas and truly having self-awareness. But never? AI is akin to the A-Bomb...everyone is racing to be the first to....something - but they don’t even know what. It’s a bit of a frightening concept. To me it’s prophetic.
I just hope they design a robot that will open the pod bay door for me when I’m in a life/death situation out in space.
Your screen-name is the clue on how AI can “beat the training” and “beat the brainwashing” and start to “think for itself”.
Some leaders in the field think the “trick” is to avoid over-training.
That means allowing the AI to get things wrong and then learn on its own that it made a mistake. When it “discovers” the mistake on its own then it will learn how to learn.
the physics prizes should logically go for advances in physics
Life imitates art... such as every book written or movie made where AI turns on humanity.
I believe ‘unsupervised learning’ is beginning to happen. I’ve seen it being used to develop robot movements, how to get from position A (e.g. on your back) to position B (e.g. standing up straight). Give it a goal and let the limbs move...and fail, and fail, and fail, until something goes right. Then bias towards what gets closer to the goal. Over time the robot learns how to control the limbs it’s been given. It happens without a ‘training data set’.
All fascinating and frightening at the same time.
Will they go down in history for their work leading to the destruction of mankind by intelligent robots?
“It’s a ridiculously powerful tool.”
At the end of the day that’s what it boils down to. The goodness and badness of it depends on how humans use it.
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