One of the “Godfathers” of AI Yoshua Bengio warned of the technology’s potential negative effects on society. He told CNBC that more research is needd to mitigate its risks.
Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal and head of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, won multiple awards for his pioneering work.
He warned that some people with “a lot of power” may even want to see humanity replaced by machines.
“It’s really important to project ourselves into the future where we have machines that are as smart as us on many counts, and what would that mean for society,” Bengio told CNBC’s Tania Bryer at the One Young World Summit in Montreal.
Machines could soon have most of the cognitive abilities of humans, he said. Artificial general intelligence (AGI) aims to equal or better human intellect.
“Intelligence gives power. So who’s going to control that power?” he said. “Having systems that know more than most people can be dangerous in the wrong hands and create more instability at a geopolitical level, for example, or terrorism.”
A limited number of organizations and governments will be able to afford to build powerful AI machines, according to Bengio. The bigger the systems are, the smarter they become.
“These machines, you know, cost billions to be built and trained [and] very few organizations and very few countries will be able to do it. That’s already the case,” he said.
“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. So, lots of open questions that we need to study with care and start mitigating as soon as we can.”
