People in charge of AI might abuse its power, AI Godfather warns

Computer science luminary and one of the world’s leading AI pioneers, Yoshua Bengio, has warned the society of possible abuse of Artificial Intelligence (AI) power by people managing it.

Bengio in an interview with CNBC said that members of an elite tech “fringe” want AI to replace humans.

The head of the University of Montreal’s Institute for Learning Algorithms, Bengio was among the public signatories of the “Right to Warn” open letter penned by leading AI researchers at OpenAI who claim they’re being silenced about the technology’s dangers.

Along with famed experts Yann LeCun and Geoffrey Hinton, he’s sometimes referred to as one of the “Godfathers of AI.”

“Intelligence gives power. So who’s going to control that power?” the preeminent machine learning expert told the outlet during the One Young World Summit in Montreal.

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

“I mean, it’s a fringe, but these people can have a lot of power, and they can do it unless we put the right guardrails right now.”