Geoffrey Hinton

Computer Scientist and Cognitive Psychologist
Born: December 6, 1947

Geoffrey Hinton is a British-Canadian computer scientist known as the “godfather of AI” for his foundational contributions to deep learning. He earned his PhD in AI from the University of Edinburgh in 1978 and later joined the University of Toronto in 1987, becoming a pivotal figure in AI research.

Hinton co-developed backpropagation in the mid-1980s, a fundamental algorithm for training neural networks that enabled modern AI applications like speech recognition and image classification. His groundbreaking work earned him the Turing Award in 2018 alongside Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, and the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2024 with John J. Hopfield for discoveries enabling machine learning with artificial neural networks.

After joining Google in 2013 to lead their Brain Team, Hinton resigned in May 2023 to speak more freely about AI risks and ethical implications. His departure marked a significant moment as he expressed growing concerns about the potential dangers of the technology he helped create.

Throughout his career, Hinton has advocated for AI’s potential while emphasizing the need for responsible development. His pioneering work remains a cornerstone of the AI field, continuing to inspire researchers and shape technology’s future.

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October 27, 2023

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Will Digital Intelligence Replace Biological Intelligence?

Digital computers allow for the exact replication and immortality of software models across hardware, enabling efficient knowledge-sharing and scalable learning algorithms like backpropagation. In contrast, analog computation mimicking biology would make the learned knowledge mortal, tied to specific hardware instances. While digital intelligences may be less prone to human flaws like religion and war, their potential superiority raises concerns about ensuring they remain aligned with human values and never seek to dominate.

Mentioned in 3 documents

Daniel Schmachtenberger and Nate Hagens

Artificial Intelligence and the Superorganism

Daniel Schmachtenberger and Nate Hagens discuss a surprisingly overlooked risk to our global systems and planetary stability: artificial intelligence. Through a systems perspective, Daniel and Nate piece together the biophysical history that has led humans to this point, heading towards (and beyond) numerous planetary boundaries, and facing geopolitical risks all with existential consequences. How does artificial intelligence not only add to these risks, but accelerate the entire dynamic of the metacrisis? What is the role of intelligence versus wisdom on our current global pathway, and can we change course? Does artificial intelligence have a role to play in creating a more stable system, or will it be the tipping point that drives our current one out of control?

Gregory Stock

Metaman

In this visionary book, Gregory Stock gives us a new way of understanding our world and our future. He develops the provocative thesis that human society has become an immense living being: a global superorganism in which we humans, knitted together by our modern technology and communication, are like the cells in an animal's body. Drawing on impressive research, Stock shows this newly formed superorganism to be more than metaphor: it is an actual living creature, which he has named Metaman, meaning beyond and transcending humans.

Andrew Clark and David Chalmers

The Extended Mind

Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? The question invites two standard replies. Some accept the boundaries of skin and skull, and say that what is outside the body is outside the mind. Others are impressed by arguments suggesting that the meaning of our words ‘just ain't in the head,’ and hold that this externalism about meaning carries over into an externalism about mind. Clark and Chalmers propose the pursuit of a third position: active externalism, based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes.