Portrait of Geoffrey Hinton

Geoffrey Hinton

Computer Scientist and Cognitive Psychologist
Born: December 6, 1947

Geoffrey Hinton is a British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist, renowned for his foundational contributions to artificial intelligence and deep learning. He completed his BA in experimental psychology from Cambridge University in 1970 and earned his PhD in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in 1978.

Hinton's career has been marked by his innovative work in neural networks. He held academic positions at institutions including the University of Sussex, University of California, San Diego, and Carnegie Mellon University. In 1987, he moved to Canada, joining the University of Toronto, where he became a pivotal figure in the AI research community. He also played a significant role at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), where he served as a fellow and directed the Neural Computation and Adaptive Perception program.

One of Hinton's major achievements is the development of backpropagation, a fundamental algorithm for training deep neural networks, which he co-introduced in the mid-1980s. His work laid the groundwork for many modern AI applications, including speech recognition, image classification, and language processing. Hinton's contributions have been widely recognized; he received the Turing Award in 2018 alongside Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun for their work on deep learning. Hinton has also been involved in industry, notably joining Google in 2013 to lead their Brain Team in Toronto, focusing on deep learning research. His insights and innovations continue to influence the direction of AI research and its practical applications.

Throughout his career, Hinton has been a vocal advocate for the potential of AI, while also expressing concerns about its ethical implications and the need for responsible development. His pioneering work remains a cornerstone of the AI field, inspiring researchers and shaping the future of technology.

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Mentioned in 3 documents

Daniel Schmachtenberger and Nate Hagens

Artificial Intelligence and the Superorganism

Daniel Schmachtenberger and Nate Hagens discuss a surprisingly overlooked risk to our global systems and planetary stability: artificial intelligence. Through a systems perspective, Daniel and Nate piece together the biophysical history that has led humans to this point, heading towards (and beyond) numerous planetary boundaries, and facing geopolitical risks all with existential consequences. How does artificial intelligence not only add to these risks, but accelerate the entire dynamic of the metacrisis? What is the role of intelligence versus wisdom on our current global pathway, and can we change course? Does artificial intelligence have a role to play in creating a more stable system, or will it be the tipping point that drives our current one out of control?

Gregory Stock

Metaman

In this visionary book, Gregory Stock gives us a new way of understanding our world and our future. He develops the provocative thesis that human society has become an immense living being: a global superorganism in which we humans, knitted together by our modern technology and communication, are like the cells in an animal's body. Drawing on impressive research, Stock shows this newly formed superorganism to be more than metaphor: it is an actual living creature, which he has named Metaman, meaning beyond and transcending humans.

Andrew Clark and David Chalmers

The Extended Mind

Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? The question invites two standard replies. Some accept the boundaries of skin and skull, and say that what is outside the body is outside the mind. Others are impressed by arguments suggesting that the meaning of our words ‘just ain't in the head,’ and hold that this externalism about meaning carries over into an externalism about mind. Clark and Chalmers propose the pursuit of a third position: active externalism, based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes.