The 'Godfather of Deep Learning' on Why We Need to Ensure AI Doesn't Just Benefit the Rich | Gizmodo

An excerpt from Martin Ford's excellent Architects of Intelligence: The Truth About AI from the People Building It:

"MARTIN FORD: What about other risks, beyond the military weapon use? Are there other issues, like privacy and transparency?

GEOFFREY HINTON: I think using it to manipulate elections and to manipulate voters is worrying. Cambridge Analytica was set up by Bob Mercer who was a machine learning person, and you’ve seen that Cambridge Analytica did a lot of damage. We have to take that seriously." 

 From another part of the interview (in the book chapter but not in the Gizmodo excerpt):

"MARTIN FORD: You gave an interview toward the end of 2017 where you said that you were suspicious of the backpropagation algorithm and that it needed to be thrown out and we needed to start from scratch. (https://www.axios.com/artificial-intelligence-pioneer-says-we-need-to-start-over-1513305524-f619efbd-9db0-4947-a9b2-7a4c310a28fe.html) That created a lot of disturbance, so I wanted to ask what you meant by that.
Geoffrey Hinton: The problem was that the context of the conversation wasn’t properly reported. I was talking about trying to understand the brain, and I was raising the issue that backpropagation may not be the right way to understand the brain. We don’t know for sure, but there are some reasons now for believing that the brain might not use backpropagation. I said that if the brain doesn’t use backpropagation, then whatever the brain is using would be an interesting candidate for artificial systems. I didn’t at all mean that we should throw out backpropagation. Backpropagation is the mainstay of all the deep learning that works, and I don’t think we should get rid of it."

Ford, Martin. Architects of Intelligence: The truth about AI from the people building it (pp. 78-79). Packt Publishing. Kindle Edition.

The 'Godfather of Deep Learning' on Why We Need to Ensure AI Doesn't Just Benefit the Rich | Gizmodo