Distinguished AI Expert Is Concerned About ‘Killer Robots’
Yoshua Bengio is worried that innovations in artificial intelligence that he helped pioneer could lead to a dark future, if “killer robots” get into the wrong hands.
The soft-spoken, 55-year-old Canadian computer scientist, a joint recipient of this year’s A.M. Turing Award, prefers to see the world though the idealism of “Star Trek” rather than the apocalyptic vision of “The Terminator.” His thoughts have been reported in detail by The New York Times.
“In ‘Star Trek,’ there is a world in which humans are governed through democracy, everyone gets good health care, education and food, and there are no wars except against some aliens,” said Dr. Bengio, whose research has helped pave the way for speech, and facial-recognition technology, computer vision and self-driving cars, among other things. “I am also trying to marry science with how it can improve society.”
Dr. Bengio was expounding on the promises, and perils, of AI on a recent day while sitting in his small, cramped office at the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, a research center he founded that has made Montreal a global center for artificial intelligence. Next to him was a whiteboard covered with complex mathematical equations, along with a warning for the cleaners written in French: “Do Not Erase.” Erasing those equations could come at a heavy cost for humans as well as machines.
Dr. Bengio, a professor of computer science at the University of Montreal, is self-effacing. But his work in an area known as deep learning, “teaching machines to learn in a way inspired by how our brains compute,” he says, has already affected our daily lives in countless ways, making it possible for Google Translate to convert a sentence from French to Mandarin or for software to detect cancer cells in a medical image.
He and his researchers are also harnessing AI to discover molecules that could cure diseases, to detect gender bias in textbooks and to predict when natural disasters will happen, laying the foundation for technologies used by billions of people.
Dr. Bengio has studiously avoided Silicon Valley in favor of a more scholarly life in Montreal, where he also co-founded Element AI, a software company.
Myriam Côté, a computer scientist who has worked with Dr. Bengio for more than a decade, described him as an iconoclast and freethinker who would feel stymied by the strictures of Silicon Valley. A communitarian at heart, he shuns hierarchy and is known for sharing the profits from his own projects with younger, less established colleagues.
Even as Stephen Hawking, the celebrated Cambridge physicist, warned that AI could be “the worst event in the history of our civilisation,” and the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has cautioned it could create an “immortal dictator,” Dr. Bengio has remained more upbeat.
Nevertheless, at a time when Facebook algorithms have come under criticism for their influence in the 2016 United States election and fears are growing that robots could use AI to target humans without human oversight, Dr. Bengio is acutely aware that his innovations risk becoming “Frankenstein’s monsters.”
As a result, he said, he supports regulating AI, including an international treaty banning “killer robots” or “lethal autonomous weapons.”
Dr. Bengio traced his interest in AI to his childhood, when he hungrily devoured the science fiction books of Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke. He said his imagination was particularly kindled by the relationship between man and machine in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
“A teacher who spends every day teaching a machine about the world resonated with me,” he said. “Science fiction was a way to dream about the future.”
When he was 12, the family moved to Montreal, where his maternal grandparents were living. While pursuing his masters and doctorate in computer science at McGill University in the late 1980s, he recalled, he was drawn to research on the development of “intelligent computers” based on so-called neural networks, mathematical algorithms that can learn tasks on their own by analyzing vast swathes of data.
“It wasn’t just some mathy thing or computer science, but about understanding human intelligence to build intelligent machines,” he said.
“The big dreams of building intelligent machines faded in the late ’90s and people thought, ‘Oh, it’s too hard — let’s just use our algorithms to solve concrete problems,’” he recalled. “I guess I am not sensitive to what people care about at a particular time, and I believed in what I was doing.”
While his trailblazing work transformed the field, Dr. Bengio still delights in spending time with students, whom he describes as a “family.” Unimpressed by scientific prizes or riches, Dr. Bengio stressed that complacency and overconfidence were the enemies of scientific progress.
“Being self-confident is not enough,” he said. “You can be self-confident and wrong.”
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