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Three Pioneers in Artificial Intelligence Win Turing Award (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2004, Geoffrey Hinton doubled down on his pursuit of a technological idea called a neural network. It was a way for machines to see the world around them, recognize sounds and even understand natural language. But scientists had spent more than 50 years working on the concept of neural networks, and machines couldn't really do any of that. Backed by the Canadian government, Dr. Hinton, a computer science professor at the University of Toronto, organized a new research community with several academics who also tackled the concept. They included Yann LeCun, a professor at New York University, and Yoshua Bengio at the University of Montreal.
On Wednesday, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest society of computing professionals, announced that Drs. Hinton, LeCun and Bengio had won this year's Turing Award for their work on neural networks. The Turing Award, which was introduced in 1966, is often called the Nobel Prize of computing, and it includes a $1 million prize, which the three scientists will share. More: The Godfathers of the AI Boom Win Computing's Highest Honor; Hinton Says We Need To Start Over; Bengio is Worried About Its Future; and Deep Learning May Need a New Programming Language That's More Flexible Than Python, LeCun Says.
On Wednesday, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest society of computing professionals, announced that Drs. Hinton, LeCun and Bengio had won this year's Turing Award for their work on neural networks. The Turing Award, which was introduced in 1966, is often called the Nobel Prize of computing, and it includes a $1 million prize, which the three scientists will share. More: The Godfathers of the AI Boom Win Computing's Highest Honor; Hinton Says We Need To Start Over; Bengio is Worried About Its Future; and Deep Learning May Need a New Programming Language That's More Flexible Than Python, LeCun Says.
We do need to stop referring to this stuff as 'Artificial Intelligence', because it isn't. 'Neural Networks', 'Deep Learning Algorithms', and so on, are not really 'intellgence' at all, they're just clever programming. Ambitious marketing people the news media, TV, and movies, they've all got people believing these things are actually human-level intelligent when they're clearly and objectively not, none of these pieces of software can 'think', they're not 'conscious', they don't really make 'decisions', not the way humans do, and most of all they do not have any capacity whatsoever to understand humans, no matter how big or fast the hardware it's running on is, and never will because it is the wrong approach. IF and WHEN we ever truly understand the mechanics of our own minds as a complete working system, not just little tiny parts of it, then we might be able to build real, actual Artificially Intelligent machines. But that day is nowhere NEAR now, we dont' even have the instrumentation to 'see' how a human brain really works. As-is, these machines they inaccurately term 'AI', need to be monitored by a human being at all times just like any other piece of automation software, because it will inevitably screw something up otherwise. Always take the results from these 'expert systems' with a huge grain of salt, filtered through your own actually intellgent, thinking brain, never trust it 100%. When we in reality have something walking around and talking to us like in I, Robot, then I'll change my opinion, but I seriously doubt that will happen in my lifetime -- if ever.