Humans should worry us more than machines, says founding father of AI

Humans should worry us more ,Yoshua Bengio is one of the pioneering developers of artificial intelligence and winner of computing’s “Nobel prize”. His optimism about machines doesn’t extend to humanity

Mikaël Theimer

OVER the past decade, machine intelligence has vastly improved. That is in large part due to deep learning, a technique that gives computers the ability to teach themselves. It underpins everything from world-beating chess and Go algorithms to digital voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri.

Yoshua Bengio is one of the pioneers of deep learning, and has spent his career at the forefront of AI research. He was recently awarded the A. M. Turing Award, which is often called the Nobel prize of computing, along with two other deep learning pioneers: Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto and Google, and Yann LeCun, who is chief AI scientist at Facebook. The trio will split the $1 million prize.

Bengio remains in academia at the University of Montreal, Canada, but co-founded an AI incubator and advises on a couple of startups. He resisted the draw of a juicy Silicon Valley salary, because he believes “humans are more important than money”. That being said, he isn’t humanity’s biggest fan. For all his optimism about the future of machines, he wouldn’t put it past us to mess things up.

How do you think AI will be able to actually help people?

The progress we have made in machine learning has been pretty amazing, and it can empower almost any sector of society.

I have invested a lot of effort in healthcare applications, especially the goal of machines being able to diagnose cancer from medical images.