Professor Yoshua Bengio, one of the three main pioneers in the field of artificial intelligence has joined the call for AI regulation and said he felt “lost”, over his life’s work.
He fears the misuse of the technology in military hands and voiced his concern over the speed at which the technology is being developed, without proper regulation in place.
Bengio along with Yann LeCun and Geoffrey Hinton are considered the three godfathers of AI for their work in the field.
Many prominent leaders are calling for a pause in development till effective regulations for the use of the technology are in place.
The popularity of AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing have even prompted industry chiefs and experts to say it poses a ‘risk of extinction’ for humanity.
Several countries and IT Giants like Google has already pledged its support for a voluntary act till the law can be enforced and have already begun enforcing guidelines for AI use. The EU has planned an extensive law that will govern the use of AI in the territory.
Professor Bengio says that he was worried that “bad actors” would gain control of the technology.
“It might be military, it might be terrorists, it might be somebody very angry, psychotic,” Bengio told BBC.
“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,” he added.
He said these concerns were taking a mental toll on him, and it felt like his life’s work was no longer clear in its sense of direction.
“You could say I feel lost. But you have to keep going and you have to engage, discuss, encourage others to think with you,” Bengio said.
Another one of the three godfathers, Doctor Geoffrey Hinton retired from Google recently, and said that he regrets his life’s work. The third godfather, Professor Yann LeCun said the apocalyptic warnings were overblown.
LeCunn at a recent event hosted by The Wall Street Journal said “I don’t think AI will try to destroy humanity, but it might put us under strict controls”.
Bengio told BBC that “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 aeroplanes or cars or pharmaceuticals”
“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”.