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India Today
23-04-2025
- Science
- India Today
Godfather of AI Geoffrey Hinton says humans are not as rational or logical as we thought
Renowned computer scientist and one of the pioneers of AI, Geoffrey Hinton, has said that our understanding of how the human brain works is going through a major change. And this, he believes, will also change the way we understand people and the subjects that study human behaviour, like the humanities. In an interview with the Toronto University Professor Emeritus, he explained that as brain science advances, we are starting to realise that humans are not as logical or rational as we have believed for a long time. As we develop more understanding of how the brain works, we're going to radically change our view of how people work, and that's going to change the humanities,' Hinton compared this change to what happened about 100 years ago when psychoanalysis became popular. That period, he explained, changed the way people thought about human behaviour. Even though some of the ideas were questionable, it helped people accept that humans often act based on unconscious thoughts and feelings. 'We accepted that we have all sorts of unconscious motivations. We accepted that we use all sorts of analogies to do things rather than just reasoning. We basically accepted we were much less rational than we thought,' Hinton added. This new change, he said, is even bigger, 'Because up until now, most people, including in the humanities, have thought that we sort of reason using something like logic. We're rational beings. We're not — we're great, big analogy machines. We work by seeing analogies.'advertisement Hinton believes that people understand the world by comparing it with things they already know, often drawing connections between multiple ideas at once.'Analogies, not just with one thing, but with lots of things. And so that changes what you think of as the nature of a person. We're analogy machines, rather than reasoning machines,' he also noted that while humans do use logic, it is only a small part of how we function. 'We've got a thin layer of reasoning on the top, and that's very important for doing things like mathematics. Without the reasoning on top, you couldn't have bank accounts and things, but we basically use analogies to think do.'Hinton's insights suggest that as AI advances, understanding how humans truly think will be key to designing machines that work more like us — not by copying logic, but by mimicking the way we draw analogies in everyday In
The Guardian
12-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Ted Kotcheff, director of First Blood, Weekend at Bernie's and Wake in Fright, dies aged 94
Ted Kotcheff, the prolific Canadian director of films including First Blood, Weekend at Bernie's, Wake in Fright and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, has died aged 94. His daughter Kate Kotcheff told the Canadian Press that he had died of heart failure on Thursday in Nuevo Vallarta, Mexico, where he lived. His son Thomas said: 'He died of old age, peacefully, and surrounded by loved ones.' In an amazingly varied career, Kotcheff's work ranged from hardhitting TV plays and low-budget features in the UK, to hit Hollywood comedies and prestige-laden award-winners and cult films. Kate Kotcheff said: 'He was an amazing storyteller. He was an incredible, larger than life character [and] he was a director who could turn his hand to anything.' The son of Bulgarian/Macedonian immigrants to Canada, Kotcheff was born in 1931 in Toronto, and raised in the city's Cabbagetown district. After earning a degree in Ebglish literature from Toronto University, Kotcheff joined a fledgling CBC in the early 1950s, part of a remarkable generation that included Norman Jewison, Arthur Hiller, Sidney J Furie and Alvin Rakoff. Like them, he felt he had to move away to further his career, and Kotcheff came to London in 1957 and began making TV plays for strands including Hour of Mystery, Armchair Theatre and ITV Playhouse. These included an adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's Emperor Jones in 1958, written by Terry Southern and starring Kenneth Spencer and Harry H Corbett, No Trams to Lime Street in 1959, written by Alun Owen, and – infamously – Underground in 1958, in which actor Gareth Jones collapsed and died during a live transmission. Kotcheff moved into features in the early 60s, making his debut with the 1962 comedy Tiara Tahiti, starring James Mason and John Mills, following it up with Life at the Top, the sequel to hit kitchen sink drama Room at the Top, in 1965, and the race-issue drama Two Gentlemen Sharing in 1969. In the same period Kotcheff also directed the original production of Lionel Bart's celebrated musical Maggie May, which premiered in 1964. Kotcheff continued to work in TV, directing Ingrid Bergman in an adaptation of Jean Cocteau's La Voix Humaine in 1967, and achieving perhaps his high point with a contribution to Play for Today in 1971, starring Patricia Hayes as a homeless alcoholic in Edna the Inebriate Woman. However his career took an unexpected detour in the same year with the cult Australian film Wake in Fright, for which he was offered the job to direct despite never having visited the country. Despite being poorly received in its home country due to its uncompromising depiction of a brutally cruel Australian outback, including notorious scenes of a kangaroo hunt, Wake in Fright was selected for the Cannes film festival and went on to become celebrated as a landmark film, both as part of the Australian new wave of the 1970s and as a pioneering entry in the 'Ozploitation' subgenre. In 1974 Kotcheff finally realised his ambition of making a successful Canadian feature film with The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz; starring Richard Dreyfuss, it was adapted from a novel by his friend (and former housemate in London) Mordecai Richler, with whom he had worked on a string of British productions – including an Armchair Theatre adaptation of Duddy Kravitz in 1961. The film won the Golden Bear at the Berlin film festival and was a major commercial success in Canada. As a result, Hollywood took notice and Kotcheff was hired to make satirical comedy Fun with Dick and Jane, starring George Segal and Jane Fonda as a successful married couple who turn to crime after Segal is fired. It was a hit on its release in 1977, and Kotcheff followed it up with another Segal comedy Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? and Nick Nolte American football film North Dallas Forty. Kotcheff then released arguably his most influential film: the Sylvester Stallone action film First Blood, which had numerous directors and lead actors attached to it before Kotcheff offered the role to Stallone and production got underway in 1981. A depiction of an emotionally embattled Vietnam veteran, First Blood was a sizeable hit and spawned two sequels, including Rambo: First Blood Part II which became a career-defining success for Stallone in 1985. Kotcheff had another big success at the end of the decade: the dead-body comedy Weekend at Bernie's, starring Andrew McCarthy. After the failure of the Tom Selleck comedy Folks! in 1992, Kotcheff returned to TV, and in 2000 joined the long running crime show Law & Order: Special Victims Unit as executive producer and occasional director, where he remained for 12 seasons. Kotcheff was married twice, to Sylvia Kay between 1962 and 1972, and to Laifun Chung, who survives him.
