Geoffrey Hinton, AI pioneer and figurehead of doomerism, wins Nobel Prize

Hinton shares the award with fellow computer scientist John Hopfield, who invented a type of pattern-matching neural network that could store and reconstruct data. Hinton built on this technology, known as a Hopfield network, to develop backpropagation, an algorithm that lets neural networks learn. Hopfield and Hinton borrowed methods from physics, especially statistical techniques, to develop their approaches. In the words of the Nobel Prize committee, the pair are recognized "for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks." But since May 2023, when MIT Technology Review helped break the news that Hinton was now scared of the technology that he had helped bring about, the 76-year-old scientist has become much better known as a figurehead for doomerism--the idea that there's a very real risk that near-future AI could precipitate catastrophic events, up to and including human extinction.