Geoffrey Hinton - Two Paths to Intelligence

Geoffrey Hinton - Two Paths to Intelligence (25 May 2023, Public Lecture, University of Cambridge) Digital computers were designed to allow a person to tell them exactly what to do. They require high energy and precise fabrication, but they allow exactly the same computation to be run on physically different pieces of hardware. For computers that learn what to do, we could abandon the fundamental principle that the software should be separable from the hardware and use very low power analog computation that makes use of the idiosynchratic properties of a particular piece of hardware. This requires a learning algorithm that can make use of the analog properties without having a good model of those properties. I will briefly describe one such algorithm. Using the idiosynchratic analog properties of the hardware makes the computation mortal. When the hardware dies, so does the learned knowledge. The knowledge can be transferred to a younger analog computer by getting the younger computer to mimic t