Tak Tsun (Edmund) Lo

2 min read

Geoffrey Hinton's talk at TU Wien: a psychologist's takeaways

By — psychologist and researcher (NL/HK). Get in touch.

Geoffrey Hinton on stage in a dark jacket and patterned tie, wearing a headset microphone, in front of a black background

I listened to a talk given at TU Wien by Prof. Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize laureate who is also known as the Godfather of AI. There is a lot of inspiration in it:

  • Why AI could be a superior form of intelligence: analog computing in human vs. digital computing in AI
  • Meaning is in the context, or, more specifically, in the way concepts deform to bind with one another
  • Subjective experience is but a working assumption: there is no internal world
  • On teaching: it’s not about teaching the right thing, but about moving people in a more correct direction
  • His vision of the urgency of helping AI develop care for humans, instead of pouring all resources into developing AI’s intelligence
  • His acknowledgement that developing an emotion system for AI is a natural next step

It’s a talk that I highly recommend. He isn’t the most enchanting presenter, but his views are insightful in this AI-accelerated age, and they tap into very fundamental issues: what life is, what intelligence is, and (perhaps because I’m a psychologist) how we can better care for the people we love.

Spare an hour to watch the talk on YouTube.

Over the next couple of days, I will post summaries of each of the points above, and I’ll discuss why they sound so relevant to me as a psychologist (no wonder: Geoffrey did his bachelor’s in experimental psychology at Cambridge!).

Photo: Geoffrey E. Hinton, 2024 Nobel Prize Laureate in Physics, via Wikimedia Commons.