Geoffrey Hinton

The role of radiologists will evolve from doing perceptual things that could probably be done by a highly trained pigeon to doing far more cognitive things.

Everybody right now, they look at the current technology, and they think, 'OK, that's what artificial neural nets are.' And they don't realize how arbitrary it is. We just made it up! And there's no reason why we shouldn't make up something else.

In the long run, curiosity-driven research just works better... Real breakthroughs come from people focusing on what they're excited about.

In science, you can say things that seem crazy, but in the long run, they can turn out to be right. We can get really good evidence, and in the end, the community will come around.

Most people in AI, particularly the younger ones, now believe that if you want a system that has a lot of knowledge in, like an amount of knowledge that would take millions of bits to quantify, the only way to get a good system with all that knowledge in it is to make it learn it. You are not going to be able to put it in by hand.

I have always been convinced that the only way to get artificial intelligence to work is to do the computation in a way similar to the human brain. That is the goal I have been pursuing. We are making progress, though we still have lots to learn about how the brain actually works.

In a sensibly organised society, if you improve productivity, there is room for everybody to benefit.

I had a stormy graduate career, where every week we would have a shouting match. I kept doing deals where I would say, 'Okay, let me do neural nets for another six months, and I will prove to you they work.' At the end of the six months, I would say, 'Yeah, but I am almost there. Give me another six months.'

Any new technology, if it's used by evil people, bad things can happen. But that's more a question of the politics of the technology.