Geoffrey Hinton? Will Douglas Heaven? Alex Hern? Apocryphal?
Question for Quote Investigator: A modern AI system is implemented with an intricate hardware device, but the crucial distinguishing characteristic of the device is a collection of parameters called weights. It is possible to store a copy of these weights in a separate location.
If the hardware device is damaged or destroyed, then a new comparable device can be constructed. The previously stored weights can be placed into the new device, and the original AI system can be resurrected. A prominent AI researcher once said the following when comparing the longevity of humans to the longevity of these digital neural network systems:
So, the good news is, we’ve discovered the secret of immortality. The bad news is, it’s not for us.
This statement has been attributed to Turing Award winner Geoffrey Hinton. Would you please help me to find a citation?
Reply from Quote Investigator: In May 2023 Geoffrey Hinton appeared at the EmTech conference, and he was interviewed by journalist Will Douglas. A transcript was published in the trade publication Computerworld. Hinton spoke about the future of humanity and immortality:1
“I think it’s quite conceivable that humanity is just a passing phase in the evolution of intelligence. You couldn’t directly evolve digital intelligence. It would require too much energy and too much careful fabrication. You need biological intelligence to evolve so that it can create digital intelligence, but digital intelligence can then absorb everything people ever wrote in a fairly slow way, which is what ChatGPT is doing, but then it can get direct access experience from the world and run much faster. It may keep us around for a while to keep the power stations running, but after that, maybe not.
“So the good news is we figured out how to build beings that are immortal. When a piece of hardware dies, they don’t die. If you’ve got the weights stored in some medium and you can find another piece of hardware that can run the same instructions, then you can bring it to life again.
“So, we’ve got immortality but it’s not for us.”
Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.
Also, in May 2023 journalist Alex Hern interviewed Geoffrey Hinton for “The Guardian” newspaper of London. Hinton spoke again about immortality:2
A “biological intelligence” such as ours, he says, has advantages. It runs at low power, “just 30 watts, even when you’re thinking”, and “every brain is a bit different”. That means we learn by mimicking others. But that approach is “very inefficient” in terms of information transfer.
Digital intelligences, by contrast, have an enormous advantage: it’s trivial to share information between multiple copies. “You pay an enormous cost in terms of energy, but when one of them learns something, all of them know it, and you can easily store more copies. So the good news is, we’ve discovered the secret of immortality. The bad news is, it’s not for us.”
In October 2023 a columnist of “The Buffalo News” in New York printed the following:3
Another deep thinker is Geoffrey Hinton, who has been called the Godfather of AI. Hinton spoke recently at an MIT conference on the topic he pioneered. He warned that we “have essentially created an immortal form of digital intelligence. And it may keep us around for a while to keep the power stations running. But after that, maybe not.” He continued, “So the good news is that we have figured out how to build beings that are immortal. But that immortality is not for us.”
In conclusion, Geoffrey Hinton deserves credit for the quotation under examination. He expressed this idea more than once using slightly different phrasings. QI suggests using the version published in “Computerworld” or the version in “The Guardian.”
Image Notes: Robot figurine from Brett Jordan at Unsplash. The image has been cropped and resized.
Acknowledgement: Great thanks to the anonymous person whose inquiry led QI to formulate this question and perform this exploration.
- Website: Computerworld, Article title: Q&A: Google’s Geoffrey Hinton — humanity just a ‘passing phase’ in the evolution of intelligence, Article author: Lucas Mearian (Senior Reporter), Date on website: May 4, 2023, Website description: News about information technology from Foundry (formerly IDG Communications). (Accessed computerworld.com on April 6, 2026) link ↩︎
- Website: The Guardian, Article title: Interview ‘We’ve discovered the secret of immortality. The bad news is it’s not for us’: why the godfather of AI fears for humanity, Article author: Alex Hern, (Interview with Geoffrey Hinton), Timestamp on website: May 5, 2023, 11.01 EDT, Website description: News website based in London, England. (Accessed theguardian.com on April 6, 2026) link ↩︎
- 2023 October 9, The Buffalo News, My View: Am I the only one who’s scared by AI? by Bob O’Connor of Hamburg, Quote Page A6, Column 4, Buffalo, New York. (Newspapers_com) ↩︎