AI Apocalypse: Nobel Winners Sound Alarm
By Nayana Wallis-Patel
Fall. Autumn. Cosy Era. Winter Arc. Cuffing Season. Whichever festive title floats your boat, one thing’s for sure: the winning laureates for the Nobel Prize won’t only have the autumn leaves falling into their laps. How does a seasonal dish of controversy with a side of £790,000 for winnings sound? I wonder how many pumpkin spiced lattes you could buy with that.
For those of you expecting a cutesy, demure angle for this autumnal edition, I’ve got a bit of a disclaimer because this year’s themes fit in exactly with the spooky season. May I cordially introduce: ‘AI-Post Apocalypse’. Well, wouldn’t you want to know why the creators of ChatGPT and Google DeepMind signed off a warning letter to raise concerns that AI might contribute to human extinction? To make things even more meddling, some of those signatures are of the 2024 Nobel Prize laureates for using concepts they previously cautioned against. Now isn’t that Halloweeny.
To break this down, there’s a few things you need to know. Demis Hassabis is the CEO of a company called DeepMind [1]. You know when you play against ‘the computer’ at a chess game or against ‘the bald guy with the orange t-shirt’ on the Wii, DeepMind effectively created their own AI player, and it’s currently ranked at #1. Having defeated the most tactical computer games ever made (Go, Blackjack, Space Invaders to name a few), it caught the attention of Google, who bought DeepMind for $400 million in 2014. What more could you expect from a child-prodigy CEO? After all, Sir Hassabis (yes, he was also knighted) only ever lost 2 games in his chess master debut at 13. One against the Hungarian grandmaster, and the second against Judit Polár, the greatest female player of all time. His parents must be proud.
Geoffrey Hinton, ‘The Godfather Of AI’, is the second name you should know. Despite earning his fame in pioneering the path for ChatGPT, he quit Google last year due to his ‘regrets for his contribution to the field [of AI]’ [2]. It’s understandable to pioneer increasingly advanced technologies, but what do you do when you invent something more intelligent than yourself? Hinton said it himself: “I wish I had a sort of simple recipe that if you do this, everything’s going to be okay, but I don’t, in particular with respect to the existential threat of these things getting out of control and taking over.” If you ask me, one of the worst things to hear from an AI-Genius is ‘I wish’. Because if they can’t figure it how, who can?
So, you have two brilliant minds, the Nobel Prize, this ‘extinction’ letter, AI, and maybe Arnold Schwarzenegger, how do they all link together?
Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis both won the 2024 Nobel Prize [3], with Hassabis’ work for solving the 50-year-old problem for predicting proteins and Hinton’s work dedicated to his life’s research. However, the year before, Hinton, told Forbes that “Over the last few months, I’ve changed my mind completely.” Hinton and Hassabis, along with Bill Gates, then voiced their panic by signing the Center for AI Safety letter in May 2023. The letter dauntingly states that ‘Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war’. I love that I got to write that in bold, really intensifies that fact that the geniuses of the tech-world believe that robots might take over. Even though Hinton’s fantastic work with artificial neural networks in machine learning granted him the Physics Nobel, is it possible the winning laureate regrets his Nobel actions here the same way he regretted contributing to programming ChatGPT? The whole suspicious conundrum raises a lot of questions; why does Hinton really regret his work? If the scientists of the world believe AI is as serious as climate change, then shouldn’t we be taking more action to minimise AI-use than exploiting it? Where’s Greta Thunberg tech-edition when you need her? Is this letter just the start? Why didn’t others sign it? Could Hassabis’ work invent a machine to predict disease spread? Should we start to binge-watch the Terminator now?
However far-fetched and hilariously paranoid it all sounds, AI isn’t just some fancy computerised wishing-well, and for most, this interesting turn of events solidified that. As for the one of other world’s highest IQ holders, apart from naming his kids like Argos would name a toaster, Elon Musk is also currently talking about creating human implants for ‘cybernetic powers’ [4]. Anyone want telekinesis? Seems like the AI-world isn’t as far-behind inventing superpowers as we thought. And neither is Queen’s Belfast for our STEM research. We also had the 2023 Nobel Prize winner Ferenc Krausz give a lecture in the Larmor last year [5]. How’s that for walking in the steps of greatness? Lastly, make sure to walk in the steps of kindness, because if anyone is going to be taken hostage when ChatGPT starts to grow legs, it’ll probably be those who didn’t say ‘thank you’ after it did their assignment for them. And on that note, Happy Halloween!
Sources:
[1] “What Is DeepMind? – Definition from WhatIs.com.” WhatIs. https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/DeepMind.
[2] Taylor, Josh, and Alex Hern. 2023. “‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton Quits Google and Warns over Dangers of Misinformation.” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/02/geoffrey-hinton-godfather-of-ai-quits-google-warns-dangers-of-machine-learning.
[3] Stokel-Walker, Chris. 2024. “Do the 2024 Nobel Prizes Show That AI Is the Future of Science?” New Scientist. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2451337-do-the-2024-nobel-prizes-show-that-ai-is-the-future-of-science/.
[4] Hart, Robert. 2024. “Elon Musk’s Neuralink Prepares to Implant Second Human Patient.” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2024/07/11/elon-musks-neuralink-prepares-to-implant-second-human-patient/.
[5] “Queen’s Hosts New Nobel Laureate for Public Lecture.” 2023. QUB. https://www.qub.ac.uk/about/Leadership-and-structure/Faculties-and-Schools/Engineering-and-Physical-Sciences/News/QueenshostsnewNobellaureateforpubliclecture.html
