Nobel Prize-winning physicist is “unnerved” by the AI ​​technology he helped develop

A US scientist who was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for his groundbreaking work on artificial intelligence said on Tuesday he found recent advances in technology “very worrying” and warned of potential catastrophe if they are not brought under control be held.

John Hopfield, a professor emeritus at Princeton University, along with fellow laureate Geoffrey Hinton, called for a deeper understanding of the inner workings of deep learning systems to prevent them from spiraling out of control.

Addressing a gathering at the University of New Jersey via video link from Britain, the 91-year-old said that over his life he had watched the rise of two powerful but potentially dangerous technologies – bioengineering and nuclear physics.

“You're used to having technologies that aren't just good or bad individually, but have capabilities in both directions,” he said.

“And as a physicist, I'm very unnerved by something that has no control, something that I don't understand well enough to understand what the limits are to pushing this technology forward.”

“That’s the question that AI raises,” he continued, adding that while modern AI systems seem to be “absolute miracles,” there is a lack of understanding of how they work, which he called “very, very troubling “ referred to.

“That is why I myself, and I think Geoffrey Hinton too, would strongly advocate that understanding is an essential need of the field, which will develop some skills beyond the skills currently imagined.”

Hopfield was honored for developing the “Hopfield Network” – a theoretical model that shows how an artificial neural network can mimic the way biological brains store and retrieve memories.

His model was improved by British-Canadian Hinton, often referred to as the “Godfather of AI,” whose “Boltzmann machine” introduced the element of chance and paved the way for modern AI applications such as image generators.

With the meteoric rise of AI capabilities – and the fierce competition it has sparked among companies – the technology has been criticized for evolving faster than scientists can fully comprehend.

“You don't know that the collective properties you started with are actually the collective properties with all the interactions present, and so you don't know whether there is something spontaneous but undesirable hidden in the works,” Hopefield pointed out.

He pointed to the example of “Ice-Nine” – a fictional, man-made crystal from Kurt Vonnegut's 1963 novel “Cat's Cradle” that was designed to help soldiers cope with muddy conditions but inadvertently ends up destroying the world's oceans freezes solid, causing the downfall of civilization.

“I worry about anything that says… 'I'm faster than you, I'm taller than you… can you live peacefully with me?' I don't know, I'm worried.

ia/bgs