Geoffrey Hinton warns of possible dangers of artificial intelligence
“It will be similar to the Industrial Revolution,” he said after the announcement. “But instead of surpassing humans in physical strength, it will surpass humans in intellectual ability. We have no experience with what it is like to have things smarter than we are.”
Hinton, who left Google to warn about the potential dangers of AI, has been called the technology’s godfather.
Now at the University of Toronto, he shared the prize with Princeton University professor John Hopfield “for fundamental discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.”
While Hinton acknowledges that AI has the potential to change some parts of society for the better – leading, for example, to “massive productivity improvements” in sectors such as healthcare – he also highlighted the potential for “a number of possible bad consequences, particularly the threat that these things will get out of hand.”
“I worry that the overall consequence of this could be that systems that are more intelligent than us end up taking control,” he said.
Hinton is not the first Nobel laureate to warn about the dangers of the technology he helped create.
Geoffrey Hinton is called the godfather of artificial intelligence (photo: Wikimedia)
Nuclear Weapons (1935)
The 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was shared by a married couple, Frederic Joliot and Irene Joliot-Curie (daughter of laureates Marie and Pierre Curie), for the discovery of the first artificially created radioactive atoms. It was a work that contributed to important advances in medicine, including the treatment of cancer, as well as the creation of the atomic bomb.
In his Nobel lecture that year, Jolyot concluded with a warning that future scientists “will be able to accomplish transmutations of an explosive type, real chemical chain reactions.”
“If such transmutations succeed in spreading into matter, one can imagine the enormous liberation of usable energy,” he said. “But unfortunately, if the contagion were to spread to all elements of our planet, the consequences of unleashing such a catastrophe can only be viewed with concern.”
Nevertheless, Joliot predicted that this would be “a process that [future] Researchers will undoubtedly try to achieve this while, we hope, taking the necessary precautions.”
Irene Jolyot-Curie and Frédéric Jolyot shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935 (photo: CNN)
Antibiotic resistance (1945)
Sir Alexander Fleming shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Ernst Chain and Sir Edward Florey for the discovery of penicillin and its use in treating bacterial infections.
Fleming had made the first discovery in 1928, and by the time he delivered his Nobel Prize speech in 1945, he had already issued an important warning to the world: “It is not difficult to make microbes resistant to penicillin in the laboratory by exposing them bunches of concentrations are not enough to kill them, and the same has happened occasionally in the body,” he said.
“There may come a time when everyone can buy penicillin in stores,” he continued. “Then there is the danger that the ignorant man can easily under-dose himself and, by exposing his microbes to non-lethal amounts of the drug, make them resistant.”
Nearly a century after Fleming’s initial discovery, antimicrobial resistance – the resistance of pathogens such as bacteria to drugs designed to treat them – is considered one of the greatest threats to global public health, according to the World Health Organization, responsible for 1, 27 million deaths in the world. 2019 only.
An important part of Fleming’s warning may have been the overuse of antibiotics, rather than the idea of low doses.
Sir Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin in 1928, received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1945 (photo: CNN)
Recombinant DNA (1980)
Paul Berg, who won the 1980 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his development of recombinant DNA, a technology that helped spur the development of the biotechnology industry, did not provide the same clear warning as some of his fellow laureates about the potential risks of his research. .
But he did acknowledge fears about what genetic engineering could lead to, including biological warfare, genetically modified foods and gene therapy, a form of medicine in which a defective gene that causes a disease is replaced with a normally functioning gene.
In his 1980 Nobel lecture, Berg focused specifically on gene therapy, stating that this approach “has many pitfalls and unknowns, including questions about the feasibility and desirability of a particular genetic disease, not to mention the risks.”
“It seems to me,” he continued, “that if we are ever to continue down this path, we will need a more detailed knowledge of how human genes are organized and how they function and are regulated.”
In an interview decades later, Berg noted that he and other scientists in the field had already come together publicly to recognize the potential dangers of the technology and work on protective barriers, at a conference known as Asilomar in 1975.
“The concerns about recombinant DNA or genetic engineering came from the scientists, so that was a very crucial fact,” he told science writer Joanna Rose in 2001.
In 2001, he said, “the experiences and experiments that have been done have shown that the original concerns that we really believed were possible did not, in fact, exist.”
Now gene therapy is a growing field in medicine, with approved treatments for sickle cell anemia, muscular dystrophy and some hereditary forms of blindness, although it is not widely used because it is still difficult to administer and very expensive.
In its early years, the technology led to the death of a 17-year-old clinical trial participant, Jesse Gelsinger, in 1999, raising ethical questions about how the research was conducted and slowing work in the field.
Although Berg himself expressed concern, he concluded his 1980 Nobel Prize speech with a call for optimism and the need to move forward.
Paul Berg receives the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in Stockholm in December 1980 (photo: CNN)
Gene editing (2020)
Four years ago, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing the CRISPR-Cas9 method for genome editing.
In her lecture, Doudna spoke in detail about the “extraordinary and exciting possibilities” of this technology in the fields of public health, agriculture and biomedicine.
But she clarified that the work must be done with much more care when applied to human cells, whose genetic changes will be passed on to offspring, unlike somatic cells, where any genetic changes will be limited to the individual.
“Heredity makes germ cell editing a very powerful tool if we think about using it, for example, in plants or to create better animal models for human diseases,” Dudna said.
Doudna, founder of the Institute for Innovative Genomics, told CNN that she believes that “appropriate warnings from scientists about the potential misuse of their discoveries are an important responsibility and useful public service, especially when the work has broad societal implications.”
“Those of us closest to the science of CRISPR understand that it is a powerful tool that can positively transform our health and the world, but has the potential to be used nefariously,” she said. “We’ve seen that dual-use potential with other transformative technologies like nuclear power – and now with AI.”
Jennifer Doudna won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work on a new gene editing method (photo: CNN)
Previously we wrote about 5 cities in the world where artificial intelligence is changing lives.
Also read how artificial intelligence will help farmers get more crops at a lower cost.
