Yoshua Bengio is widely credited as being at the vanguard of artificial intelligence, along with Dr. Geoffrey Hinton and Professor Yann LuCun. The threesome won a high-profile Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery for their pioneering work in the AI field.
Now Bengio, a 59-year-old Canadian computer scientist and the scientific director of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, joins a chorus of AI thought leaders like Elon Musk and Bill Gates expressing deep concerns over how the technology will be used.
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Bengio said he doesn’t want “powerful” AI technology to be leveraged by “bad actors” in a June 1 interview with the BBC.
"It might be military, it might be terrorists, it might be somebody very angry, psychotic,” he said. “And so if it's easy to program these AI systems to ask them to do something very bad, this could be very dangerous.”
"If they're smarter than us, then it's hard for us to stop these systems or to prevent damage," Bengio noted.
Public policymakers are also going to need to step up to regulate the technology.
"Governments need to track what they're doing, they need to be able to audit them, and that's just the minimum thing we do for any other sector like building airplanes or cars or pharmaceuticals," Bengio said. “We also need the people who are close to these systems to have a kind of certification... we need ethical training here. Computer scientists don't usually get that, by the way."
Describing the responsibility of being a founding "Godfather" of AI as “challenging”, Bengio said "You could say I feel lost. But you have to keep going and you have to engage, discuss, encourage others to think with you."
