Geoffrey Hinton · University of Toronto (Emeritus) · 2024-12-10
Hinton's Nobel banquet remarks are the shortest and most-quoted thing he has put on paper since leaving Google. In a few hundred words he names the immediate harms — surveillance, autonomous weapons, content collapse — and then states the long-tail worry plainly: we have no idea whether we can stay in control of digital minds smarter than ours.
We include it instead of an interview because it is on the record, written, and signed. For a learner this is the cleanest first encounter with the x-risk argument from someone whose technical credentials are not in dispute. Read it before any of the longer talks; the talks are mostly elaborations of this paragraph.
> We have no idea whether we can stay in control.