{"id":8781,"date":"2024-10-08T15:03:47","date_gmt":"2024-10-08T15:03:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/2024\/10\/08\/nobel-physics-prize-awarded-to-godfather-of-ai-who-warned-the-technology-could-end-humanity\/"},"modified":"2024-10-08T15:03:47","modified_gmt":"2024-10-08T15:03:47","slug":"nobel-physics-prize-awarded-to-godfather-of-ai-who-warned-the-technology-could-end-humanity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/2024\/10\/08\/nobel-physics-prize-awarded-to-godfather-of-ai-who-warned-the-technology-could-end-humanity\/","title":{"rendered":"Nobel physics prize awarded to \u2018godfather of AI\u2019 who warned the technology could end humanity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The 2024 Nobel prize for physics has been awarded to two scientists who laid &#8220;the foundation&#8221; for artificial intelligence &#8211; although one of them recently warned the technology could be the end of humanity.<\/p>\n<p>John Hopfield from Princeton University and Geoffrey Hinton from the University of Toronto spent decades developing our knowledge of artificial neural networks, which are the basis of a lot of modern <strong>artificial intelligence<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<div class=\"sdc-site-outbrain sdc-site-outbrain--AR_6\" aria-hidden=\"true\" data-component-name=\"sdc-site-outbrain\" data-target=\"\" data-widget-mapping=\"\" data-installation-keys=\"\">    <\/div>\n<p>Artificial neural networks are inspired by the human brain.<\/p>\n<p>Just as we learn by strengthening or weakening the connections between synapses, machines can learn by strengthening or weakening the connections between nodes.<\/p>\n<p>Professor Hopfield and Professor Hinton, who has been described as the &#8220;godfather of AI&#8221;, developed artificial neural networks that helped &#8220;initiate the current explosive development of machine learning,&#8221; according to the awarding body, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.<\/p>\n<div class=\"ad ad--teads\">        <\/div>\n<p>But despite his work advancing the technology, Professor Hinton made waves last year when he stepped down from Google in 2023 because of his concerns about AI.<\/p>\n<p>In an <strong>interview with the New York Times<\/strong>, he said he sometimes regretted his life&#8217;s work, telling the newspaper: &#8220;It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>He even warned the technology could pose a threat to humanity because the machines often learn unexpected behaviour from the vast amounts of data they analyse.<\/p>\n<p>They will share a prize of 11 million Swedish kroner (around \u00a3810,000).<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;This year&#8217;s two <strong>Nobel<\/strong> Laureates in physics have used tools from physics to develop methods that are the foundation of today&#8217;s powerful machine learning,&#8221; said the academy in a statement.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Machine learning based on artificial neural networks is currently revolutionising science, engineering and daily life.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The Nobel prizes are considered some of the most prestigious awards in the world and were created in the will of Alfred Nobel, a Swedish scientist who invented dynamite.<\/p>\n<p>Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, who helped modern understanding of atomic structure, both received the Nobel prize for physics in the past.<\/p>\n<p>Last year it was awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L&#8217;Huillier for their work in creating ultra-short pulses of light that can show changes within atoms, potentially improving the detection of diseases.<\/p>\n<p>Physics is the second Nobel to be awarded this week.<\/p>\n<p>Yesterday, two American scientists who discovered how <strong>&#8220;microRNA&#8221; controls the decoding of genetic information <\/strong>in living organisms received the Nobel prize for medicine.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<div>This post appeared first on sky.com<\/div>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The 2024 Nobel prize for physics has been awarded to two scientists who laid &#8220;the&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8782,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8781"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8781\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}