Nobel Prize winners

Oct 14, 2024 Features / Columnists, News, The GHK Lall Column

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Kaieteur News – What an achievement!  To win the Nobel Prize must rank as the pinnacle of one’s lifework, maybe life itself.  John Hopfield of Princeton University and Geoffrey Hinton of the University of Toronto are the 2024 recipients of the Nobel Prize for physics.  Their pioneering work in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) gave them the nod in what had to be a close race with their global peers.

Artificial intelligence.  It has that special sound, as though it was some dazzling new weapon honed by a master craftsman in the employ of a master of samurais.  A machine mimicking man maybe even capable of mastering the best that his brain has to offer, given a little more time.  It is awesome.  It is frightening.  Both have an impact on me.  Perhaps, if residence was still in the good ole USA the awe would be at the same level, with the healthy fear still around, though at a palpably lower level.  Too many bricks and blocks to slowdown.  Too many check to slowdown any runaway mayhem on the part of this wondrous creation emerging from the mind of man, like that Greek goddess of yore, Minerva, springing from the head of the king of the big ones, Zeus.  There are, also, more than enough people who have what it takes to raise a hand to arrest its dangerous trajectory, the untold carnage that AI could cause.  Men and women who still hold on to that precious part of life that is called their own mind, and then putting it to the best use for the benefit of their times and their contemporaries.  America has its protections, what is believed could take the upper hand there.  This is Guyana and I will be so reckless, so thoughtless, as to point to the powerful and the unscrupulous, and all the odiousness that they have proven that they can conceive, then deliver.  They are a pack of reptiles. Guyana’s democracy is the shelter that is like a nudist colony: everybody sees everything.

Guyana with AI in its hands is a jarring consideration.  Look at what the rather mundane and just as tame social media (relatively speaking, of course) has done to Guyanese, where it has deposited them.  Do I need to say more?  Thinking of Guyana in its present criminal state from the political heights to the population lowlands, then coupling that with all that AI could be made to do, and the result is a nightmarish vision.  It is possible that some additional work could be found for the secret contingent of Israelis here, who provide sophisticated guidance to the powers of today on technological matters. The Israelis are among the best at this kind of stuff.  Just ask Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and the Lebanese.  The concern is what would Guyanese do to themselves then, when all the features, powers, and possibilities are in their less than clean hands?  It is expected that the Honorable Attorney General, Mr. Anil Nandlall, a man who has his own standards of truth, justice, principle, and what constitutes fairness, would be among the first to give profound reassurances that Guyanese need not be overly concerned, for they will be protected.  The ‘they’ almost certainly will not be extended to people who think like me and then have the courage to share such thoughts with the world.  Just so that the attorney general, the president, and the former president all get the message, I make myself Alamogordo, New Mexico (atom bomb explosion) clear: whatever law is concocted, and supposed to shield Guyanese from the excesses of AI misuse, I have no confidence in it, for who such would protect, who it would expose.  Thus: I spit on it and then it is watered using another product of the human body.  The crimes have been too many, Mr. AG, and those involve only the comparatively pedestrian social media.  They have been too long with his own PPP Government agents functioning as the prime scoundrels and look at where matters have always led.  Nowhere.

In contrast, study all the places to which AI can take.  It can make the criminally cunning sound like the original, when nobody said anything.  Or what was said or written artfully distorted to defeat them.  To put in a different way, AI can take voice, patterns, style and more of the unsuspecting, and attach the roguish and reprehensible to bring such offensive citizens down.  This is what has been attempted repeatedly here before, hasn’t it, Cde AG?  What happened to the criminals in the PPP?  What law was enforced to exact a just penalty for the crimes of comrades, Mr. Chief Sheriff?  If citizens and justice were failed when social media was abused, then there can be no confidence that AI would not be employed by the PPP (or the PNC) to attack and defame conscientious and law-abiding citizens.

As the newly minted Professor Hinton said, this product, AI, has gotten too far ahead of us.  It can prove to be irresistible and uncontrollable for those with power given a tool to expand their power further to the detriment of citizens. Like that other great American, J. Robert Oppenheimer and his masterpiece, the atom bomb, John Hopfield and Godfrey Hinton gave the world their own extraordinary resource in AI.  Oppenheimer created ‘the destroyer of worlds’ with the atom bomb that came via the Manhattan Project.  Hopfield and Hinton just presented their own Doomsday Project through AI. It is still gathering strength.  Law-abiding Guyanese who infuriate the powerful, please be forewarned.

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• artificial, Attorney General, John Hopfield, Mr. Anil Nandlall, Princeton University

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