Not Insects: The Life of Geoffrey Hinton
Sale price
$21.99
Regular price $26.99
Skip to product information
Not Insects: The Life of Geoffrey Hinton
Sale price
$21.99
Regular price $26.99
The first definitive biography of the Nobel Prize-winning "Godfather of AI" — the man who taught machines to learn, then quit Google to warn the world about what he built.
Geoffrey Hinton spent fifty years pursuing an idea that almost everyone in science said was a dead end. He believed that the way to build intelligent machines was to model them on the brain. He was right.
Born into a dynasty of geniuses — his great-great-grandfather George Boole invented the binary logic that underpins all computing, his father loved beetles more than his children — Hinton dropped out of Cambridge, read Dostoevsky in a London bedsit, and then embarked on a career that would reshape civilization.
He built the Boltzmann Machine. He co-authored the backpropagation paper that reopened the field of neural networks. He trained AlexNet, the system that launched the deep learning revolution. He sold his three-person startup to Google for $44 million. He won the Turing Award and the Nobel Prize in Physics.
He also buried two wives. He raised two children alone. He bought a private island and cut down trees with a chainsaw to process his grief.
In 2023, at the age of seventy-five, he quit Google to warn the world that the technology he had created might be the most dangerous thing in human history. He estimates there is a ten to twenty percent chance that artificial intelligence will destroy civilization.
Not Insects is the story of the man who taught machines to learn — and who now fears what they will learn next.
Based on 40 primary sources including interviews from CBS 60 Minutes, The New Yorker, CNN, The Economist, the Nobel Prize, Jon Stewart, and more.
Geoffrey Hinton spent fifty years pursuing an idea that almost everyone in science said was a dead end. He believed that the way to build intelligent machines was to model them on the brain. He was right.
Born into a dynasty of geniuses — his great-great-grandfather George Boole invented the binary logic that underpins all computing, his father loved beetles more than his children — Hinton dropped out of Cambridge, read Dostoevsky in a London bedsit, and then embarked on a career that would reshape civilization.
He built the Boltzmann Machine. He co-authored the backpropagation paper that reopened the field of neural networks. He trained AlexNet, the system that launched the deep learning revolution. He sold his three-person startup to Google for $44 million. He won the Turing Award and the Nobel Prize in Physics.
He also buried two wives. He raised two children alone. He bought a private island and cut down trees with a chainsaw to process his grief.
In 2023, at the age of seventy-five, he quit Google to warn the world that the technology he had created might be the most dangerous thing in human history. He estimates there is a ten to twenty percent chance that artificial intelligence will destroy civilization.
Not Insects is the story of the man who taught machines to learn — and who now fears what they will learn next.
Based on 40 primary sources including interviews from CBS 60 Minutes, The New Yorker, CNN, The Economist, the Nobel Prize, Jon Stewart, and more.