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Re:Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto Win 2024 Turing Award by vonneumannstan on Wednesday March 05, 2025 @11:35AM (#43268881)
>this fetishism to dig into another person’s personal life and find the most weird thing they said as the thing that paints over all of their life’s achievements as evil must stop.

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.

Re:Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto Win 2024 Turing Award by tsunego on Wednesday March 05, 2025 @02:45PM (#43271340)
> This has nothing to do with his professional life.

you mean his personal life?

Re:Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto Win 2024 Turing Award by vonneumannstan on Thursday March 06, 2025 @11:16AM (#43281874)
oops, yes.
Re:Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto Win 2024 Turing Award by textlapse on Wednesday March 05, 2025 @03:20PM (#43271784)
It just feels like a smear on his character: Imagine working on RL incrementally without any lofty goals or preconceived evil.

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.

Re:Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto Win 2024 Turing Award by hollerith on Thursday March 06, 2025 @09:28AM (#43280591)
People left careers in AI in the 1990s because they came to realize that the tech would probably eventually become dangerous. Many more (including the star student in my CS program in the 1980s) never started a career in AI for the same reason.

Sutton and everyone else who has advanced the field deserve condemnation IMO, not awards.