We will see a completely new type of computer, says AI pioneer Geoff Hinton

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Machine-learning forms of artificial intelligence are going to produce a revolution in computer systems, a new kind of hardware-software union that can put AI in your toaster, according to AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton.

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Hinton, offering the closing keynote Thursday at this year's Neural Information Processing Systems conference, NeurIPS, in New Orleans, said that the machine learning research community "has been slow to realize the implications of deep learning for how computers are built."

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Future computer systems, said Hinton, will be take a different approach: they will be "neuromorphic," and they will be "mortal," meaning that every computer will be a close bond of the software that represents neural nets with hardware that is messy, in the sense of having analog rather than digital elements, which can incorporate elements of uncertainty and can develop over time. 

"Now, the alternative to that, which computer scientists really don't like because it's attacking one of their foundational principles, is to say we're going to give up on the separation of hardware and software," explained Hinton. 

Also: LeCun, Hinton, Bengio: AI conspirators awarded prestigious Turing prize

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