This has nothing to do with his professional life. He has made these comments in a professional capacity at an industry AI conference... The rest of your comment is a total non sequitur.
>And worst of all internet gives your opinion the same weight as someone else (or the rest of us) who knows a lot about thing B that could change the world. From a strictly professional capacity.
I've worked professionally in the ML field for 7 years so don't try some appeal to authority bs on me. Geoff Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei and countless other leaders in the field all recognize and highlight the possible dangers of this technology.
you mean his personal life?
I do agree that there is some level of inherent safety issues with such technologies - but look at atomic bomb vs fission reactors etc: history paves a way through positivity.
Just because someone had an idea that eventually turned to have some evil branch off way further from the root idea doesn't mean they started with the evil idea in the first place or worse, someone else won't.
Sutton and everyone else who has advanced the field deserve condemnation IMO, not awards.
Reminds me of a quote from Jean Cocteau, of which I could not find the exact words, but which roughly says that if the public knew what thoughts geniuses can have, it would be more terrified than admiring.
I don't think it's a question of whether their achievements are nullified, but as you mention, how to weight the opinions of various people. Personally, I think both a Turing award for technical achievement and a view that humanity ought to be replaced are relevant in evaluating someone's opinions on AI policy, and we shouldn't forget the latter because of the former.
(Also, this isn't about Sutton's personal life - that's a pretty bad strawman.)
Repressive laws on open AI/models—giving elites total control in the name of safety?
And this alternative perspective from the cult should disqualify someone from a Turing Award despite their achievements?
It’s silly and dangerous. Because you don’t like thing A and they said/did thing A all of their lofty accomplishments get nullified by anyone. And worst of all internet gives your opinion the same weight as someone else (or the rest of us) who knows a lot about thing B that could change the world. From a strictly professional capacity.
This works me up because this is what’s dividing up people right now at a much larger scale.
I wish you well.