Pioneers in artificial intelligence win the Nobel Prize in physics

STOCKHOLM — 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. At a Princeton news conference, he made reference to the concerns, bringing up the dystopia imagined in George Orwell's “1984,” or the fictional apocalypse inadvertently created by a Nobel-winning physicist in Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle.” Neither winner was home to get the call Hopfield, who was staying with his wife at a cottage in Hampshire, England, said that after grabbing coffee and getting his flu shot, he opened his computer to a flurry of activity. And that’s very useful.” Physics prize for pioneer AI work is significant Hopfield, 91, created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data, the Nobel committee said. “I don’t think that neural nets and language models as they exist today pose an existential risk.” Bengio, who has long voiced concerns about AI risks, said what really alarms him and Hinton is “loss of human control” and whether AI systems will act morally when they're smarter than humans. "And we should make sure we do before we build those machines.” Asked whether the Nobel committee might have factored in Hinton’s warnings when deciding on the award, Bengio dismissed that, saying “we’re talking about very early work when we thought that everything would be rosy.” Six days of Nobel announcements opened Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize.