The “godfather of AI” Yoshua Bengio
Yoshua Bengio, a computer scientist considered the “godfather” of AI, is now warning of its dangers. “Intelligence gives power. So, who is going to control this power?” he asks.
One of the main pioneers of AI, Yoshua Bengio, said in an interview that not only could increasingly powerful AI harm the world, but also that the people responsible for it can be just as dangerous.
As , Bengio is the director of the Institute of Learning Algorithms at the University of Montreal and was one of the public signatories of the open letter ““, written by the main AI researchers at OpenAI, which guarantee that they are being silenced about the dangers of this technology.
Together with famous experts Yann LeCun e Geoffrey Hintonis nicknamed the “Godfather of AI”. However, it is not because he created it that he does not see its dangers: “Intelligence gives power. So who will control this power?” he asks rhetorically.
“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 said. “It’s a fringe of society, but These people can have a lot of powerand they can do that unless we put the right protections in place now.”
As AI is a very expensive technology to develop, sometimes costing billions of euros, the computer scientist believes that “there will be a concentration of power: economic power, which can be bad for markets; political power, which can be bad for democracy; and military power, which can be bad for geopolitical stability of our planet.”
The computer scientist also warns that it is not known how long it will take for AI to reach a “human level”: “If it is five years from now, we are not prepared”, he concluded, “because We do not have methods to ensure that these systems will not harm people or they will not turn against them.”
