Connectionists: An open letter to Geoffrey Hinton: A call for civilized, moderated debate

[Gary Marcus]

Dear Geoff, 

Please stop taking potshots. Face me. 

You say I am irrelevant, yet you attack (and misrepresent) me regularly in your talks, including both this morning at The Vector Institute, and your “just weights” riff in the Fall. On your web page, you have more mentions of me than Yann LeCun. (What greater measure of relevance could there be?) 

To make it easy for you, I will come to Toronto, on your home turf. (Perhaps Vector Institute and Web Summit could co-host). 

We will get a neutral moderator, and a huge audience. And we can fight together for the things we are actually both concerned about, around AI safety, and make a huge statement by doing so.

The world will learn from the debate—and also from our overlap.  It will be win-win for the world. 

— Gary