This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

So the way the brain works is this.

Neurons get inputs, and if they get an F input, they go ping. And the input to a neuron either comes from the senses,

but for most neurons, it's input from other neurons. And so a neurons receiving these ping from other

neurons... Jeffrey Hinton has been thinking about how brains work for a very long time.

Hinton is a computer scientist who's been called the Godfather of Artificial Intelligence,

AI.

For decades, he worked on building computers that would work in a way analogous to the human brain itself.

It's an approach known as neural networks. This was an obscure and seemingly

fruitless effort for a long while, but eventually it paid off beyond anybody's imagination.

That work on neural networks led to incredibly intricate machines like Dolly, which will take

your prompts and make you a beautiful picture.

Or chat GPT, which in the last year put AI on everybody's radar.

Well, that was a future that nobody expected.

These are machines that learn and perhaps even think.

What strength are associated with each incoming ping,

so that it can decide if it got enough input for it to go ping.

And that's all there is. That's all you need to know to know how the brain works.

It's very clear that an AI revolution is at hand, here and now, and it's going to reshape our world profoundly.

But Jeffrey Hinton, the foremost pioneer of neural networks, has come to have concerns

about what AI can do. Very serious concerns. Joshua Rothman, the New Yorker's ideas editor,

recently talked with Hinton in-depth, and will hear some of their conversation today.

...