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Adapt to changing technology or get the fuck out of our way
L. Radocchia May 5, 2023
The open letter from tech profiteers calling for a dramatic pause in their competition space.
Baffled by the current media coverage of AI, I decided to investigate the people asking for interference in progress. I wanted to know who is saying this, why they would say it, and how anyone could believe there is an authority great enough (let alone ethical enough) to stop advancing technology. Many of the hefty names being called “tech leaders” would be more accurately called “business leaders in the tech industry” directly benefiting from the exposure this media sensationalism provides them.
The headlines call this man the “Godfather of AI” but you’ve probably never heard of him. That’s because the title more accurately described someone else, John McCarthy, who coined the term in 1955 and organized the 1956 Dartmouth Conference, which marked the birth of AI as a field of research. He is considered a “founding father” of artificial intelligence, together with Alan Turing, Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell, and others. Almost twenty years later, the newly-dubbed “Godfather of AI,” Geoffrey Hinton, graduated with a degree in Psychology. Rather than a godfather, he is more like a nepo-baby of AI. His great-grandparents were founders of the logic that made modern computing possible, and his great-grandmother’s wikipedia page states that “Geoffrey Hinton is great grand of Boole, Hinton is well known as father of Artificial Intelligence (AI).” Hinton was about five years old when AI was ‘Godfathered.’ So, how did this rebranding happen?
I asked ChatGPT4 who Geoffrey Hinton is, and it granted him the title “Godfather of Deep Learning.” This honorific would make a more accurate, if less flashy, headline. Perhaps the media lacks clarity about the difference in the terms? To clarify, Artificial Intelligence is the field that encompasses various intelligent systems, while deep learning is a subset of machine learning that uses deep neural networks to learn from data. This means…
