Nobel Prize winner Prof Geoffrey Hinton speaks of fears for AI future he helped create

Geoffrey Hinton, the alumnus of the University of Cambridge who was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics earlier this month, has spoken of his win and previously-expressed fears that the AI he helped to develop could end humanity.

Prof Hinton was born in London in 1947 to entomologist Howard Hinton and Margaret Clark, a teacher.

He is the great-great-grandson of mathematician Mary Boole and her husband, George Boole, whose work laid the foundations of modern computer science.

Prof Hinton studied experimental psychology at the University of Cambridge before obtaining his PhD in artificial intelligence from Edinburgh University in 1978.

In 2012, he and two of his graduate students built a neural network – a computer that mimics the human brain – that could analyse photos and identify common objects. It was hailed as a major milestone in AI development.

Prof Hinton, 76 – who described the call about his Nobel award as a “bolt from the blue” – shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics with John Hopfield, of Princeton University.

Often called the ‘godfather of AI’, he spent his entire career researching the development and uses of technologies that power AI: in 2018 he received the Turing Award for his contribution.

Although his work laid the foundations of machine learning, Prof Hinton has warned that machines that could outsmart humans pose an existential threat to humanity.

Last year, he resigned from his job at Google, saying “bad actors” will use new AI technologies to harm others and that the tools he helped to create could spell the end of humanity.

Before his departure, Prof Hinton split his time between Google’s AI research team and the University of Toronto, where he is a professor emeritus.

In an interview with the New York Times, Prof Hinton said “it is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things”.

Throughout his career in the US, which includes stints at the University of California San Diego and Carnegie-Mellon University, Prof Hinton has refused to take funding from the American military, and moved to Canada to continue his research.

Once optimistic about the benefits of AI, Prof Hinton gradually became worried that AI technologies will, in time, upend the job market. He joins another famous scientist who warned that AI will be the end of humanity - Stephen Hawking, who suggested that instead of assisting the human workload, AI will replace it. Others suggest we should embrace AI.

Earlier this year, Prof Hinton said in an interview with the BBC’s Newsnight that the British government will have to establish a universal basic income to deal with the impact of AI on inequality.

Speaking this month at the press conference organised by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Sweden, Prof Hinton said AI will have a “huge influence” on humanity that could be comparable with the Industrial Revolution – a period of huge scientific and technological development in the 18th century.

He also added that this technology “is going to exceed people in intellectual ability”, which leaves him worried about “a number of possible bad consequences, particularly the threat of these things getting out of control”.

When asked about whether he had any regrets about his pioneering work on AI, Prof Hinton said: “There are two kinds of regret – there is regret where you feel guilty because you did something you knew you should not have done, and then then there is regret where you did something that you would do again in the same circumstances.”

He said that he “would do the same again” but was “worried that the overall consequence of this might be systems more intelligent than us that eventually take control”.