I’m not convinced that inventing back propagation gives one the authority to opine on more general technological/social trends. Frankly, many of the most important questions are difficult or impossible to know. In the case of neural networks, Hinton himself would never have become as famous were it not for one of those trends (the cost of GPU compute and the breakthrough of using GPUs for training) which was difficult or impossible to foresee.
In an alternate universe, NNs are still slow and compute limited, and we use something like evolutionary algorithms for solving hard problems. Hinton would still be just as smart and backpropagation still just as sound but no one would listen to his opinions on the future of AI.
The point is, he is quite lucky in terms of time and place, and giving outsized weight to his opinions on matters not directly related to his work is a fairly clear example of survivorship bias.
Finally, we also shouldn’t ignore the fact that Hinton’s isn’t the only well-credentialed opinion out there. There are other equally if not more esteemed academics with whom Hinton is at odds. Him inventing backpropagation is good enough to get him in the door to that conversation, but doesn’t give him carte blanche authority on the matter.
Of course he was lucky, you should expect that in general for well-known people because selection pressures that led you to hear of them, vs not hear of them, are likely to involve luck.
That is not at all a slam dunk argument. It’s barely anything.
Well unless you’re claiming the same luck that led to Hinton’s fame will lead to his accuracy on the much broader and less constrained topic of the relationship between automated systems and society, I don’t see how it’s not something.
My main point wasn’t to undermine Hinton by saying he was lucky. I did do that and I stand by it. But my main point was to say that to a large degree the future on this issue is unknowable because it depends on so many crucial yet undetermined factors. And there’s nothing you could know about backpropagation, neural networks, or computer science in general which could resolve those questions.
All people on the leading edge of big things have benefited from a huge amount of luck, and there were likely 100s of other folks on the leading edge of other potential breakthroughs that didn't happen, each of whom were equally capable in terms of raw problem solving ability or IQ. The difference is that when you get the chance to ride the wave, and you and ride it for 10, 15, 20 years, it gives you a significantly different and improved set of experiences, expertise, and problem solving ability than the folks who never had that shot but were still capable. The magic is partly that he was smart, partly that he was lucky, and also partly that the experience of pushing the field forward for 20 years and the field following you brings you something that very few others have and that is in fact very valuable.
To say Hinton is just lucky is short-changing both the work he did, the environment he did it in and utterly ignores the amount of pressure to abandon the work he was doing because it was considered to be a dead end by just about everybody else until it suddenly wasn't.
In an alternate universe, NNs are still slow and compute limited, and we use something like evolutionary algorithms for solving hard problems. Hinton would still be just as smart and backpropagation still just as sound but no one would listen to his opinions on the future of AI.
The point is, he is quite lucky in terms of time and place, and giving outsized weight to his opinions on matters not directly related to his work is a fairly clear example of survivorship bias.
Finally, we also shouldn’t ignore the fact that Hinton’s isn’t the only well-credentialed opinion out there. There are other equally if not more esteemed academics with whom Hinton is at odds. Him inventing backpropagation is good enough to get him in the door to that conversation, but doesn’t give him carte blanche authority on the matter.