Artificial Intelligence, like climate change, is one of those topics that keeps on bubbling to the surface of the news agenda and then subsiding again. Perhaps because, as T.S. Eliot noted in “Burnt Norton,” in the Four Quartets – “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” ( Interestingly, when I scoured the Internet for that quote it was ChatGBT that supplied the source.) The latest turn in the AI public debate came in May when Professor Geoffrey Hinton (75), above, resigned from his position as Vice-President and Engineering Fellow at Google, claiming he’d changed his mind about the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence.
“I’m sounding the alarms, saying we have to worry about this,” he told an MIT hosted digital conference shortly after announcing his resignation. Although Dr Hinton has long believed that computer models weren’t as powerful as the human brain, he now fears they are already outperforming humans.
“Whenever one [model] learns anything, all the others know it,” Hinton said. “People can’t do that. If I learn a whole lot of stuff about quantum mechanics and I want you to know all that stuff about quantum mechanics, it’s a long, painful process of getting you to understand it.”
AI can also process vast quantities of data — much more than a single person can. “AI models can detect trends in data that aren’t otherwise visible to a person — just like a doctor who had seen 100 million patients would notice more trends and have more insights than a doctor who had seen only a thousand. “
But in the wrong hands, Hinton sees artificial intelligence as an “existential threat. ”I think it’s quite conceivable that humanity is just a passing phase in the evolution of intelligence.”
The rational answer might be to stop developing AI further but Hinton says this is naive and unlikely. “If you’re going to live in a capitalist system, you can’t stop Google [from] competing with Microsoft.”
What makes Hinton’s U-turn so troubling is that he’s a deep learning pioneer who shared a Turing Award (the equivalent of a Nobel in the field of computer science) in 2018 for his research on neural networks.
He is colloquially known as a “godfather of AI”. Which is ironic because he’s a direct link to the 19th century mathematical logician George Boole (1815-1864), whose research earned him the moniker the “father of computer science”. Boole was Geoffrey Hinton’s great-great-grandfather.
An untutored genius, Boole believed that logical relations could be expressed in symbolic form. This idea would later grow into his major contribution to science: to explain the process of human thought in precise mathematical terms. Boole’s symbolic logic proved eminently suitable for the design of modern computers.
Boole was the first professor of mathematics at Queen’s College, now University College Cork. He was married to Mary Everest (1832–1916), a niece of geographer and British Surveyor General of India, Sir George Everest (after whom the mountain was named). Mary was a self-taught mathematician and educationalist. The couple lived in Cork until Boole’s death in 1864 and their five daughters were all born in Ireland.
To say they were a brilliant and accomplished family is an understatement.
The eldest daughter Mary Ellen Boole married Charles Howard Hinton (great grandfather of Geoffrey Hinton) in London in April 1880. A mathematician and writer of science fiction, he pursued research in visualising the geometry of higher dimensions. Mary Ellen lectured in and wrote poetry and was an early advocate of voluntary euthanasia. A year after the sudden death of her husband in 1907, she committed suicide. Some time before she had written, “Life is something that has within it the privilege of ending when we choose. When life becomes a burden it is everybody’s right to exercise that privilege.”
Her sister Margaret Boole studied painting and was the mother of the renowned Cambridge physicist and mathematician Geoffrey Ingram Taylor, who led research in fluid mechanics and the quantum theory of radiation.
Alicia Boole Stott was the third of the five daughters, born in 1860. After her father’s death, the family moved to London but Alicia remained with relatives in Cork for a further seven years. Despite having no formal education in mathematics, she developed an interest in four-dimensional geometry through her brother-law-Charles Hinton. From the age of seventeen until her death, she made several important discoveries in this area. She learned her mathematics at her mother’s knee and worked alone on her geometric pursuits. But in 1895, she began a collaboration with Dutch professor Peiter Schoute, who helped to publish some of her work.
Another sister, Lucy Everest Boole, was a lecturer in chemistry at the London School of Medicine for Women and the first woman elected a Fellow of the Institute of Chemistry. She was the first female co-author to have a paper read before the London Pharmaceutical Society. She died prematurely in 1904 aged 42.
The youngest Boole sister, Ethel, Voynich (b.1864) became a revolutionary and activist. She travelled in Russia (1887–9), giving music lessons in St Petersburg, associating with families of political prisoners, and rendering medical assistance to the poor suffering under Russia’s tsarist rule. She also composed music and wrote four novels. The first of these, The Gadfly (1897) was an immediate international success and was made into a film in the Soviet Union with music by Dmitri Shostakovich.
The creative/inventive gene continued through the generations of the Boole family.
Leonard Boole, Alicia’s son, invented a portable X-ray machine, an artificial pneumothorax apparatus, and a system of navigation based on spherical geometry. He was also a medical doctor, a pioneer in the treatment of tuberculosis.
George and Mary Boole’s great-grandchildren include Howard Everest Hinton, a distinguished entomologist; William Hinton, a Marxist writer; and Joan Hinton, a nuclear physicist and one of the few women scientists involved in the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos. The devastating consequences of the bombing of Hiroshima converted her into an outspoken pacifist. In 1948 she gave up physics and went to live in Maoist China. (Interestingly, neither Joan Hinton nor any of the other female scientists feature in Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film Oppenheimer.)
Geoffrey Hinton belongs to the next generation of scientific explorers in the family, now turned refusenik.
George Boole’s biographer, Prof Desmond MacHale, has written that Boole’s name will live on as long as digital computers continue to operate. Boole would have been delighted, MacHale notes, if he’d known how all modern communication – whether of data, text or images – comprises strings of the Boolean symbols 0 and 1.
But would his delight have extended to AI?
Or would he have sided with his great-great-grandson, Geoffrey Hinton, who has voted on AI with his feet.
Photograph: Geoffrey Hinton. http://www.cs.toronto.edu
mary morrissy 