Nobel winner John Hopfield warns of ‘catastrophe’ if AI advances are not ‘controlled’

John Hopfield said he finds recent advances in artificial intelligence technology “very unnerving” and called for more research to understand advances in AI.

John Hopfield, the 2024 Nobel physics prize winner who is known for his pioneering work on artificial intelligence (AI), said on Tuesday that he found recent advances in AI “very unnerving” and also warned of “possible catastrophe” if such advances are not controlled.

Princeton University professor John Hopfield, who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for discoveries and inventions that laid the foundation for machine learning, poses in a classroom in Princeton, New Jersey, U.S. in an undated photograph. (via REUTERS)

The US scientist from Princeton University joined his co-winner Geoffrey Hinton in calling for deeper understanding of inner workings of deep-learning systems and AI to prevent them from spiralling out of control, news agency AFP reported.

"One is accustomed to having technologies which are not singularly only good or only bad but have capabilities in both directions. And as a physicist, I'm very unnerved by something which has no control, something which I don't understand well enough so that I can understand what are the limits which one could drive that technology. That's the question AI is pushing," Hopfield said while virtually addressing a gathering at the New Jersey university.

His warning is not new in the world of AI. The rapid advancement of AI has sparked fear among companies on the technology going out of control. AI itself has faced criticism for evolving faster than scientists can fully understand.

Hopfield evoked the example of "ice-nine" -- a fictional, artificially engineered crystal in Kurt Vonnegut's 1963 novel "Cat's Cradle", developed to help soldiers deal with muddy conditions, but which inadvertently freezes the world's oceans solid, causing the downfall of civilization.

Calling for more research to understand AI, he also stressed that it was impossible to escape “catastrophic scenarios” at present.

“I'm advocating that our best young researchers, or many of them, should work on AI safety, and governments should force the large companies to provide the computational facilities that they need to do that,” AFP quoted Hopfield as saying.

Physics Nobel Prize 2024

Hopfield was awarded Physics Nobel Prize 2024 for inventing the “Hopfield network” -a theoretical model to demonstrate how artificial neural AI networks can emulate human brains to store and retrieve memories.

His model was improved upon by British-Canadian Hinton, whose "Boltzmann machine", which introduced the element of randomness, paving the way for modern generative AI applications.

Hilton had emerged as an icon of AI doomsayers last year. "If you look around, there are very few examples of more intelligent things being controlled by less intelligent things, which makes you wonder whether when AI gets smarter than us, it's going to take over control," the 76-year-old had said.

(With AFP inputs)