Fringe Theory
One of the world’s leading AI pioneers is warning not only that the increasingly powerful technology could harm the world, but that the people in charge of it may be equally dangerous.
In an interview with CNBC, computer science luminary Yoshua Bengio said that members of an elite tech “fringe” want AI to replace humans.
The head of the University of Montreal’s Institute for Learning Algorithms, Bengio was among the public signatories of the “Right to Warn” open letter penned by leading AI researchers at OpenAI who claim they’re being silenced about the technology’s dangers. Along with famed experts Yann LeCun and Geoffrey Hinton, he’s sometimes referred to as one of the “Godfathers of AI.”
“Intelligence gives power. So who’s going to control that power?” the preeminent machine learning expert told the outlet during the One Young World Summit in Montreal.
“There are people who might want to abuse that power, and there are people who might be happy to see humanity replaced by machines,” Bengio claimed. “I mean, it’s a fringe, but these people can have a lot of power, and they can do it unless we put the right guardrails right now.”
Money Talks
Because AI systems cost billions of dollars to build, the deep learning expert noted, the financial power aspect can’t be ignored.
“Very few organizations and very few countries will be able to do it,” the University of Montreal AI lab leader said. “That’s already the case.”
“There’s going to be a concentration of power: economic power, which can be bad for markets; political power, which could be bad for democracy; and military power, which could be bad for the geopolitical stability of our planet,” he continued.
Currently, experts disagree on whether artificial general intelligence, or human-level AI, can be reached and when it might happen. If it happens before global policy catches up, Bengio suggests, we’re in trouble.
“If it’s five years, we’re not ready,” he concluded, “because we don’t have methods to make sure that these systems will not harm people or will not turn against people.”
While far from the first AI expert to offer warnings about the dangers of AI, Bengio has unusual gravitas; after all, he helped create it.
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