Nobelizing the Godfather of Artificial Intelligence

"He pioneered the efforts to establish deep and dense neural networks."

"[His work and that of co-laureate John Hopfield is fundamental to machine learning; Mr. Hinton is] a leading figure in the development of efficient learning algorithms."

"Today, artificial neural networks are powerful tools in research fields spanning physics, chemistry and medicine, as well as daily life."

Ellen Moons, chair, Nobel physics committee

"It was a lot of fun doing the research but it was slightly annoying that many people -- in fact, most people in the field of AI -- said that neural networks would never work."

"They were very confident that these things were just a waste of time and we would never be able to learn complicated things like, for example, understanding natural language using neural networks -- and they were wrong."

"I believe [henceforth] I'm going to spend my time advocating for people to work on safety [in the use of artificial intelligence]."

Geoffrey Hinton, professor emeritus, University of Toronto

Geoffrey Hinton, left, a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, received his Nobel Prize in physics from Sweden's King Carl Gustaf on Tuesday. (Henrik Montgomery/AP)

 

Often referred to as the 'Godfather of artificial intelligence', 77-year-old artificial intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, and with John Hopfield, a professor emeritus with Princeton University, received the Nobel Prize for physics at a ceremony in Stockholm, where the computer scientists were formally presented with their prize by King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden. Immediately prior to the actual presentation, Nobel physics committee chair Ellen Moons addressed the gathering at the Stockholm Concert Hall.

The two scientists were co-jointly awarded the Nobel as a result of their use of physic to develop some of the architecture of machine learning, a branch of computer science developed to guide AI to mimic the way human beings learn. Professor Hinton's work which was responsible for recognizing him with the Nobel, saw completion in the 1980s. At a time when artificial intelligence was in the distant future, forecasting the technology of today.

 

Professor Hinton may have found it dispiriting to have his work disparaged by his peers in the field of AI as unworkable, but he was undeterred and went on to create the Boltzmann machine, which learns from examples and not instructions, and when trained is able to recognize familiar characteristics in information, regardless of whether it has previously been exposed to the data.

 

About $1.4 million (Canadian funds) accompanies the prize which the two -- Hinton and Hopfield -- will split. Professor Hinton has earmarked a portion of his share to Water First, an organization based in Ontario that works to further access to water for Indigenous populations, along with benefiting another charity that gives support to neurodiverse young adults. "Frontier research" is no longer in Professor Hinton's future, he stated. 

While Professor Hinton continues to be involved in the University of Toronto community, he also acts as chief scientific adviser for the Vector Institute, a Toronto-based AI research hub. He had separated himself from a role he held at Google to enable him last year to speak unfettered, respecting his concerns over the potential dangers inherent in AI. He has identified bias and discrimination, fake news, joblessness, lethal autonomous weapons and possibly the end of humanity, linked to AI's and humanity's future.

 

Students, staff and professors from the University of Toronto watch on screens as U of T professor Geoffrey Hinton receives the Nobel Prize in physics for his work in AI at a ceremony in Sweden on Tuesday. (Chris Young/The Canadian Press)

"[I consider my legacy as a leading AI researcher a] mixed blessing."

"I wish it was just going to be an impact for good. If it was just an impact for good it would be wonderful and I would be very satisfied. But it's not. There are a lot of risks that come with it, and we haven't done enough research to know how to control those risks."

"[As for leading AI companies, such as OpenAI, they have become] more and more concerned with short-term profit and less concerned with safety."

Geoffrey Hinton

University of Toronto Antisemitic Encampment & the University's Shocking Complicity

"[The University of Toronto encampment and accompanying anti-Israel movement] was not primarily a grassroots student protest."

"A slew of outside agitators, including faculty, health care workers, climate justice groups, labour activists, trade unionists, gay rights activists, socialists/Marxists and activists with local chapters [of] the Palestine Youth Movement and Samidoun [linked themselves with the 'People's Circle for Palestine']"

The Canary Mission report: University of Toronto Antisemitic Encampment & the University's Shocking Complicity 

"[There were numerous documented instances of overtly antisemitic statements, including:] "kike", "We need another Holocaust", "Jews belong in the sea Palestine will be free" "Death to the Jews", "Hamas for Prime Minister", "You dirty f--cking Jew", "Go back to Europe", and "Itbach El Yahood" ["slaughter the Jews"]."

Ontario Superior Court Judge Markus Koehnen

An anti-Israel tent encampment protesting the war in Gaza continues to stand at the University of Toronto campus on Tuesday May 7, 2024. (Photo by Peter J. Thompson/National Post)

 

Canary Mission, founded to document antisemitic and anti-Israel actions on the campuses of North American universities, has released a study of University of Toronto, concluding its administrators failed to respond while their campus was taken over by supporters of terrorism, organized by outside agitators. Dozens of U of T faculty were listed as supporters of the pro-Hamas demonstrations that characterized the activities of the encampment. On May 2nd, a group of protesters breached a fence, then occupied the King's College Circle courtyard for two months.

The fence was lined with posters celebrating the atrocities in southern Israel committed by Hamas operatives, calling for more violent uprisings both in Israel and in Canada as well. In their study and subsequent report, Canary Mission pointed out 153 professors, 123 employed by the university included, publicly gave their support to the encampment, while 45 of them took active participation and six delivered addresses to the gathering of antisemites bitterly condemning Israel's counterterrorism action in Gaza.

Concealing identities behind keffiyehs and medical masks, these were sociopathic thugs who acted to confine access to the occupied area where any who wished to enter were first forced to commit to agreeing with a number of statements that excluded 'Zionists' or Israel-sympathizers, much less Jews themselves from gaining access. The report's authors are scathing in their condemnation of the  university's administration which took no action to arrest the protest movement that posed a hostile environment for Jewish students and faculty.

The pathetic excuse given was a wish to avoid violence by confronting and attempting to dismantle the camp, much less enforce the university's own code of conduct. Nor did the university ever appear to address the issue of its own professors supporting the encampment. Some of whom have been identified as members of the university's chapter of Faculty for Palestine, credited in the report with forcing the administration to retreat from its threat of disciplining faculty members refusing to comply with the initial trespass notice.

The Faculty for Palestine complained that the university had ignored its responsibility to its own "supposed commitment to academic freedom, anti-racism and human rights", while they were themselves instrumental in denying those freedoms and respect for human rights while practising racism against the Jewish student body and faculty members. As well, many of the F4P members have involvement in the Hearing Palestine initiative at the university, "an intellectual hub at the University of Toronto that centres the study of Palestine and facilitates advanced interdisciplinary research on Palestine, past, present and future".

This is, of course, a Palestine of their imaginative choosing, linked with Arab Palestinians and de-linked from the primary presence of Palestinian Jews, when during the pre-Christian era of the Roman Occupation of the Middle East, the province known as Judea was renamed Syria Palaestina by the Roman administration. Its occupants were Jews. There never was a 'Palestine' dedicated to Arabs, not in the dim and distant past, not in the recent past, and not at the present time, other than an Arab co-opting of ancestral Judea.

The former encampment at the University of Toronto. Photo by Jesse Kline/National Post