Yoshua Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal and head of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, told CNBC at the One Young World summit in Montreal that he had concerns about the technology and warned that some people with “a lot of power” may even want humanity to be replaced by machines.
Bengio knows what he’s talking about because he is a pioneer in this field. He has won many awards for his research on artificial intelligence, which tries to imitate the activity of the human brain to learn to recognize complex patterns in data, reminds CNBC.
“It’s really important to imagine a future where we have machines that are as intelligent as we are in many ways, and what that would mean for society,” Bengio told CNBC’s Tania Bryer at the summit.
Intelligence gives power
“Intelligence gives power. So who will control this power?” Bengio said, adding that possession systems that know more than most people can be dangerous in the wrong hands.
And according to the professor, machines may soon have most of the cognitive abilities that humans have.
Concentrating AI power is dangerous
According to Bengio, the enormous costs of building powerful AI machines will mean that only a limited number of organizations and governments will be able to afford them. And the larger the systems, the smarter the machines will become.
In this situation there will be a concentration of power. About the professor’s assessment, in case economic power, financial markets will suffer. In the case of political power, AI concentration may prove bad for democracy.
And finally, concentration military power poses a threat to the geopolitical stability of our planet – says Bengio. There are arguments to suggest that the way AI machines are currently trained, “would lead to systems that would turn against people,” Bengio told CNBC.
Protective barriers must be built now
Bengio, along with a group of current and former Open AI employees, endorsed an open letter in June titled: “The right to warn about advanced artificial intelligence“.
The letter contains a warning about the serious risks associated with the development of artificial intelligence.
First, governments must introduce regulations that will force companies that build and train pioneering systems for a lot of money to register them. “Governments should know where they are and what the details of these systems are,” Bengio told CNBC. Companies developing artificial intelligence must also be accountable for their actions.
