A long line of prestigious speakers, ranging from Sir Winston Churchill to Dame Iris Murdoch, has delivered the annual Romanes lecture at the University of Oxford, starting with William Gladstone in 1892.
But rarely, if ever, can a lecturer have made such an arresting comment as Geoffrey Hinton did this week. The leading artificial intelligence researcher’s speech, provocatively entitled Will Digital Intelligence Replace Biological Intelligence?, concluded: almost certainly, yes. But Hinton rejected the idea, common in some West Coast tech circles, that humanism is somehow “racist” in continuing to assert the primacy of our own species over electronic forms of intelligence. “We humans should make our best efforts to stay around,” he joked.
The British-Canadian computer scientist came to fame as one of the pioneers of the “deep learning” techniques that have revolutionised AI, enabling the creation of generative AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT. For most of his career in academia and at Google, Hinton believed that AI did not pose a threat to humanity. But the 76-year-old researcher says he experienced an “epiphany” last year and quit Google to speak out about the risks.