• But people accusing Israel of war crimes against innocent Gazans are not antisemites, they are simply human.
• A compromise is the only bloodless choice. A compromise or eternal war.
• Within it. No claim for exclusive ownership.
• At the same time, he is allowing the most fanatical Jews on the planet, his far-right coalition partners, to decide what Judaism means.
• These people appear to want Israel to sacrifice all the remaining hostages and hundreds, even thousands more soldiers, to conquer the whole of Gaza, ethnically cleanse it of Palestinians and settle Jews instead.
• Their goal — and please take them very seriously — is the coming of the Messiah, the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem and eternal power and glory for the Children of Israel, Smotrich-style.
• Then there is the third partner propping up the Netanyahu government: ultra-Orthodox parties. If this group had its way, Israel would become a theocracy based on Halachah religious law, an equivalent of the Muslim sharia. This part of society, about 13 per cent, are buoyed by privileges given to them by Ben-Gurion in the 1950s: granted their own education system, hermetically closed to any secular core curriculum and funded by the state, they also have almost wholesale exemption from military service, which is mandatory for most Jewish Israeli citizens over the age of 18.
• as the Gaza war deteriorated from a just counter-attack against Hamas to a bloodbath of Palestinian civilians, it became clear that Netanyahu needed to destroy democracy in order to stay in power. He was willing enough to destroy it in order to stop his trial for corruption; all the more so now that he’s a war criminal too.
• “The shorter the occupation, the better for us. Because even an imposed occupation is destructive. Even an enlightened and humane and liberal occupation is an occupation. I fear for the quality of the seeds we sow in the near future in the hearts of the occupied. More than that, I fear for the seed that is being sown in the heart of the occupiers. And the first signs are already recognisable now, on the fringes of society.”

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• Does it lead to us becoming lazy and uncreative? Cognitive offloading is an idea currently being discussed, where users of AI tools delegate tasks without engaging in critical thinking or retaining the information retrieved. Time for an analogy.

  “We wear clothes, and because we wear clothes, we are less hairy. We are more prone to die of cold, but only if we don’t have clothes”. Hinton thinks as long as we have access to helpful AI systems, it is a valuable tool.
• “She got ChatGPT to tell me what a rat I was,” he says, admitting the move surprised him. “She got the chatbot to explain how awful my behaviour was and gave it to me. I didn’t think I had been a rat, so it didn’t make me feel too bad . . . I met somebody I liked more, you know how it goes.” He laughs, then adds: “Maybe you don’t!”
• I resist the urge to dish the dirt on former flames, and instead mention that I just celebrated my first wedding anniversary. “Hopefully, this won’t be an issue for a while,” he responds, and we laugh.
• “Every time I talk to journalists, I correct that misapprehension. But it never has any effect because it’s a good story,” he says. “I left because I was 75, I could no longer program as well as I used to, and there’s a lot of stuff on Netflix I haven’t had a chance to watch. I had worked very hard for 55 years, and I felt it was time to retire . . . And I thought, since I am leaving anyway, I could talk about the risks.”
• “What’s actually going to happen is rich people are going to use AI to replace workers,” he says. “It’s going to create massive unemployment and a huge rise in profits. It will make a few people much richer and most people poorer. That’s not AI’s fault, that is the capitalist system.”

• Does it lead to us becoming lazy and uncreative? Cognitive offloading is an idea currently being discussed, where users of AI tools delegate tasks without engaging in critical thinking or retaining the information retrieved. Time for an analogy.

  “We wear clothes, and because we wear clothes, we are less hairy. We are more prone to die of cold, but only if we don’t have clothes”. Hinton thinks as long as we have access to helpful AI systems, it is a valuable tool.
• “We don’t know what is going to happen, we have no idea, and people who tell you what is going to happen are just being silly,” he adds. “We are at a point in history where something amazing is happening, and it may be amazingly good, and it may be amazingly bad. We can make guesses, but things aren’t going to stay like they are.”

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