Geoffrey Hinton, AI pioneer and University of Toronto professor, receives Nobel Prize for physics [Video]

In the end, Geoffrey Hinton’s message was short and to the point.

At a celebratory banquet held in Sweden’s capital on Tuesday, Canada’s newest Nobel laureate stepped to the lectern and said that artificial intelligence offers huge benefits to productivity but comes with big risks.

Both are possible because of neural networks, a technology that Dr. Hinton, who is an emeritus professor at the University of Toronto, played a central role in developing and for which he was named a co-winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for physics.

Powered by neural networks, computers are now succeeding at complex tasks that were once deemed beyond the reach of machines. It is not because they are getting better at mimicking human reasoning, Dr. Hinton said, but because they are learning to emulate human intuition.

He then listed some of the harms that AI is already causing in the hands of authoritarian governments …