I’m sure he’s smart and all. His contributions were valuable. But he’s not special in this particular moment.
Who, in your opinion, _does_ have enough context to be worth our attention?
Because if you’re waiting for Sam Altman or the entire OpenAI team to say “guys, I think we made a mistake here” we’re going to be knee-deep in paperclips.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Dark-Sun/Richard-Rhod...
Today:
Germany's relevant minister has already declared at G7 that Germany can not follow Italy's example. "Banning generative AI is not an option".
https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/G-7-in-Japan/Banning-gener...
US Senate has a bill drawing the line on AI launching nuclear weapons but to think US military, intelligence, and industry will sit out the AI arms race is not realistic.
https://www.markey.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/block_nuclear_la...
China's CPC's future existence (imo) depends on AI based surveillance, propaganda, and realtime behavior conditioning. (re RT conditioning: We've already experienced this outselves via interacting with the recent chatbots to some extent. I certainly modulated my interactions to avoid the AI mommy retors.)
https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-rctom/submission/using-machi...
But beyond all of that, what are we really asking? Are we asking about social ramifications? Because I don’t think the OpenAI devs are particularly noteworthy in their ability to divine those either. It’s more of a business question if anything. Are we talking about where the tech goes next? Because then it’s probably the devs or at least indie folks playing with the models themselves.
None of that means Hinton’s opinions are wrong. Form your own opinions. Don’t delegate your thinking.
Are you basically saying that you only trust warnings about AI from people who have pushed the most recent update to the latest headline-grabbing AI system at the latest AI darling unicorn? If so, aren't those people strongly self-selected to be optimistic about AI's impacts, else they might not be so keen on actively building it? And that's even setting aside they would also be financially incentivized against publicly expressing whatever doubts they do hold.
Isn't this is kind of like asking for authoritative opinions on carbon emissions from the people who are actually pumping the oil?
If not Geoff Hinton, then, who?
Ultimately the harm is either real or not. If it is real, then the people with the most accurate beliefs and principles will be the ones who never joined the industry in the first place because they anticipated where it would lead, and didn't want to contribute. If it is not real, then the people with the most accurate beliefs will be the ones leading the charge to accelerate the industry. But neither group's opinions carry much credibility as opinions, because it's obvious in advance what opinions each group would self-select to have. (So they can only hope to persuade by offering logical arguments and data, not by the weight of their authoritative opinions.)
In my view, someone who makes landmark contributions to the oil industry for 20 years and then quits in order to speak frankly about their concerns with the societal impacts of their industry... is probably the most credible voice you could ever expect to find expressing a concern, if your measure of credibility involves experience pumping oil.
He received a Turing Award for his work that was foundational to the current state of the art.
Isn't that ad hoc ergo propter hoc?
That argument would also support the statement "he went all in with 2-7 preflop, and won the hand, so he must be good at poker" -- I assume you and I would both agree that statement is not true. So why does it apply in Geoffrey's case?
With respect, you seem to be shifting goalposts, from the indefensible (Hinton doesn't know what he's talking about) to the irrelevant (Hinton doesn't have perfect and complete knowledge of the future).
Even if they're too busy doing the work, they're still thinking about what it would be like if it performed successfully, and it does seem to always take more retrospection before a leader can fully raise their head and more carefully consider unintended consequences.
Early success can give the impression that future efforts have difficulty being as meaningful, but also realistically after that the successful individual does not need to struggle to prove themself any more the way the less-accomplished would be expected to do.
Then there's seniority itself, and maturity levels that can not be gained any other way.
Beyond that when retirement is within easy reach you don't really have the same obligation to decorum itself as you would earlier, in order to actually maintain the same desired level of decorum.
Dr. Hinton seems to do a pretty good job of comparing himself to Oppenheimer.
I don't see how anyone else can question his standing more seriously than that.
Who knows, maybe a decade or two from now we'll see a resurgence of capsule networks, or maybe not. But I'd be a bit more careful about rejecting Hinton's hunches out of hand, his track record is pretty good.