Nobel Prize in physics, awarded to 2 scientists for discoveries that enabled AI

Two pioneers of artificial intelligence – John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton – won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for helping create the building blocks of machine learning that is revolutionising the way we work and live but also creates new threats to humanity, one of the winners said.

Hinton, who is known as the Godfather of artificial intelligence, is a citizen of Canada and Britain who works at the University of Toronto and Hopfield is an American working at Princeton.

“This year’s two Nobel Laureates in physics have used tools from physics to develop methods that are the foundation of today’s powerful machine learning,” the Nobel Committee said in a press release.

Ellen Moons, a member of the Nobel Committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said the two laureates “used fundamental concepts from statistical physics to design artificial neural networks that function as associative memories and find patterns in large data sets.”

She said that such networks have been used to advance research in physics and “have also become part of our daily lives, for instance in facial recognition and language translation.”

While the committee honoured the science behind machine learning and AI, Moons also mentioned its flipside, saying that “while machine learning has enormous benefits, its rapid development has also raised concerns about our future. Collectively, humans carry the responsibility for using this new technology in a safe and ethical way for the greatest benefit of humankind.”