My father was an entomologist who believed in continental drift. In the early '50s, that was regarded as nonsense. It was in the mid-'50s that it came back. Someone had thought of it 30 or 40 years earlier named Alfred Wegener, and he never got to see it come back.

Geoffrey Hinton

To deal with a 14-dimensional space, visualize a 3-D space and say 'fourteen' to yourself very loudly. Everyone does it.

Geoffrey Hinton

fourteen space doe

I think we should think of AI as the intellectual equivalent of a backhoe. It will be much better than us at a lot of things.

Geoffrey Hinton

intellectual should thinking

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.

Geoffrey Hinton

crazy running long

In deep learning, the algorithms we use now are versions of the algorithms we were developing in the 1980s, the 1990s. People were very optimistic about them, but it turns out they didn't work too well.

Geoffrey Hinton

optimistic use people

I think people need to understand that deep learning is making a lot of things, behind-the-scenes, much better. Deep learning is already working in Google search, and in image search; it allows you to image search a term like "hug."

Geoffrey Hinton

google people thinking

I refuse to say anything beyond five years because I don't think we can see much beyond five years.

Geoffrey Hinton

say-anything years thinking

As soon as you have good mechanical technology, you can make things like backhoes that can dig holes in the road. But of course a backhoe can knock your head off. But you don't want to not develop a backhoe because it can knock your head off, that would be regarded as silly.

Geoffrey Hinton

technology would-be silly

In the brain, you have connections between the neurons called synapses, and they can change. All your knowledge is stored in those synapses. You have about 1,000-trillion synapses - 10 to the 15, it's a very big number.

Geoffrey Hinton

connections brain numbers

Backhoes can save us a lot of digging. But of course, you can misuse it.

Geoffrey Hinton

digging misuse courses

You look at these past predictions like there's only a market in the world for five computers [as allegedly said by IBM founder Thomas Watson] and you realize it's not a good idea to predict too far into the future.

Geoffrey Hinton

looks past ideas

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.

Geoffrey Hinton

evil-people used technology

In A.I., the holy grail was how do you generate internal representations.

Geoffrey Hinton

internal how you holy

The brain sure as hell doesn't work by somebody programming in rules.

Geoffrey Hinton

rules hell brain work

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.

Geoffrey Hinton

intelligence progress brain work

Computers will understand sarcasm before Americans do.

Geoffrey Hinton

computers will understand sarcasm

Early AI was mainly based on logic. You're trying to make computers that reason like people. The second route is from biology: You're trying to make computers that can perceive and act and adapt like animals.

Geoffrey Hinton

ai computers you people

A deep-learning system doesn't have any explanatory power.

Geoffrey Hinton

system any power

Deep learning is already working in Google search and in image search; it allows you to image-search a term like 'hug.' It's used to getting you Smart Replies to your Gmail. It's in speech and vision. It will soon be used in machine translation, I believe.

Geoffrey Hinton

you vision learning believe

Machines can do things cheaper and better. We're very used to that in banking, for example. ATM machines are better than tellers if you want a simple transaction. They're faster, they're less trouble, they're more reliable, so they put tellers out of work.

Geoffrey Hinton

better you simple work

The brain has about ten thousand parameters for every second of experience. We do not really have much experience about how systems like that work or how to make them be so good at finding structure in data.

Geoffrey Hinton

good experience brain work