Professor Geoffrey Hinton, Nobel Prize Winner aka “The Godfather of AI”
On 10th October 2024 Horsham had a fascinating evening meeting on AI. None of us are experts on the subject but five members did some research whilst others ‘chipped in’ from time to time. We talked about Prof Geoffrey Hinton ‘The Godfather of AI’ and Prof John Hopfield who were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics this week for their work on machine learning. Machines don’t know right from wrong, have no capacity for emotion or responsibility and cannot be held accountable so what are the implications for us? There is a lot of fear surrounding the capabilities of AI but it also has great potential for good. Algorithms or ‘prompts’ are of vital importance to ensure safety. Asking the right questions in the first instance is of paramount importance. There are huge beneficial opportunities for its use in medicine, transport, climate change, in tackling human trafficking, fraud and so on. We discussed robotics used to detect and repair pot holes in roads, robot ‘friends’ ( with reference to Kazuo Ishiguro’s book, Klara and the Sun), and the Hawk-Eye Live system that will replace human line judges at Wimbledon Tennis Championships next year. Sue had witnessed a robot ‘dog’ in Horsham delivering a parcel! Google it! The loss of jobs is a real cause for concern and there will obviously be a need for a major skills upgrade and retraining of a workforce.
Gill and Jenny demonstrated Chat gpt, a text generator (probably used by countless pupils challenged with writing essays nowadays) and DALL- E, an image generator. See results below!
DALL-E AI generated NWR LOGO
Bing programme AI generated NWR LOGO
