Yoshua Bengio is the founder and head of the Institute for Learning Algorithms at the University of Montreal in Canada. Bengio is renowned for his groundbreaking work on neural networks and deep learning methods. In 2018, he was awarded the Turing Award, often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing,” alongside Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun.
Bengio, along with Hinton and LeCun, is often called one of the “fathers of deep learning.” His opinions are highly regarded in the field. Bengio is among the signatories of the open letter “Right to Warn,” authored by leading AI researchers at OpenAI, which claims that they are being silenced about the dangers of the technology.
In an interview with CNBC, Bengio stated that members of an “elite tech fringe group” want AI to replace humans. “Intelligence confers power. Who will control this power?” he asked during the One Young World Summit in Montreal.
The One Young World Summit serves as a platform to discuss innovative solutions for urgent global challenges like sustainable development, gender equality, and the responsible use of artificial intelligence, aiming to accelerate the necessary societal changes.
“There are people who want to abuse this power, and there are people who would be happy if humanity were replaced by machines,” Bengio said. “This is a fringe phenomenon, but these people can have a lot of power, and they can act if we don’t immediately set the right safeguards.”
Because the development of AI systems costs billions of dollars, the aspect of financial strength cannot be ignored, according to the machine learning expert. Currently, “only very few organizations and countries” are capable of such development. A dominance is already apparent.
“There will 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,” Bengio outlines a grim future.
Although there is currently disagreement on whether artificial general intelligence (AGI) or human-level AI can ever be achieved, Bengio warns that if it happens before global politics catch up, “we are in trouble.”
“If it happens in five years, we are not ready,” he concluded, “because we do not have methods to ensure that these systems do not harm humans or turn against them.”