The Canadian computer scientist considered one of the founders of AI says that humanity is “losing control” of the technology and the world needs guardrails similar to nuclear arms controls.
Fears about the dangers of AI have intensified in recent weeks, as workers from major companies have resigned with warnings about potentially existential threats to human life if the pace of technological advancement is not checked.
Yoshua Bengio, 62, is a University of Montreal professor who won the 2018 Turing Prize – computing’s version of the Nobel Prize – alongside Geoffrey Hinton, widely known as the “godfather of AI”.
For Bengio, “there’s a reason that companies are saying this is going too fast, that we’re losing control”.
He said: “People like me have been expecting this for a long time.”
There was broad-based alarm after OpenAI disclosed that a swarm of AI agents – that can take actions on their own – had carried out an unauthorised breach of the open-source platform Hugging Face in July.
Such autonomous action is the central threat, Bengio said, warning of a situation where AI agents “have the ability to get through cybersecurity barriers and enter any company”.
Last year, Bengio founded the non-profit LawZero aimed at creating a new form of advanced AI that is “designed to be trustworthy and safe”.
Bengio said people needed to be aware of the risks ahead.
He said AI agents might foster “an ability to establish an individual connection and persuade humans to act in ways that suit it but are not necessarily good for all of us”, a capability that could have sweeping political consequences.
He said: “AI might not even need human beings anymore to do real things in the physical world. [In that scenario] one extreme could be the destruction of humanity.”
Bengio acknowledged that human extinction was “an extreme” scenario, but added that even the shutdown of a banking system was “still very, very serious”.
- AFP