Some powerful people want machines to replace humans, warns artificial intelligence pioneer

An artificial intelligence pioneer has sent out an ominous warning not about the technology itself, but about the people who control it. Canadian computer scientist Yoshua Bengio said in an interview with CNBC that there are elite tech tycoons who want to replace humans with artificial intelligence, reports Futurism.

Bengio is one of the people called the godfather of artificial intelligence. He has also previously expressed concern about artificial intelligence and was one of the signatories of the “Right to Warn” open letter written by leading artificial intelligence researchers at OpenAI. They said the technology had a number of dangers and they were being pressured not to talk about them.

Speaking at the One Young Global Summit in Montreal, Bengio said: “Intelligence gives power. So who will control this power?

“There are people who might want to abuse that power, and there are people who might be happy about humanity being replaced by machines,” Bengio said.

He warned that although there are only a few such people, they need to be stopped right now.

“I mean, it’s a fringe thing, but these people can have a lot of power, and they can do this if we don’t put the right guardrails in place right now.”

“There will be concentrated power: economic power, which may be bad for markets; political power, which can be bad for democracy; and military power, which could be bad for the geopolitical stability of our planet,” he continued.

World leaders need to take steps to control the growing power of AI, although no one can say for sure when human-level AI might be achieved. However, if the latter happens before a global policy on the issue is reached, it will spell trouble.

“If it’s five years, we’re not ready,” he concluded, “because we don’t have the methods to make sure these systems don’t hurt people or turn against people.”

Several other experts also called for artificial intelligence to be controlled while there is still time.