Famed computer scientist Yoshua Bengio — an artificial intelligence pioneer — has warned of the nascent technology's potential negative effec

AI systems could 'turn against humans': Tech pioneer Yoshua Bengio warns of artificial intelligence risks

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2024-11-21 19:30:06

Famed computer scientist Yoshua Bengio — an artificial intelligence pioneer — has warned of the nascent technology's potential negative effects on society and called for more research to mitigate its risks.

Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal and head of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, has won multiple awards for his work in deep learning, a subset of AI that attempts to mimic the activity in the human brain to learn how to recognize complex patterns in data.

But he has concerns about the technology and warned that some people with "a lot of power" may even want to see humanity replaced by machines.

"It's really important to project ourselves into the future where we have machines that are as smart as us on many counts, and what would that mean for society," Bengio told CNBC's Tania Bryer at the One Young World Summit in Montreal.

Machines could soon have most of the cognitive abilities of humans, he said — artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a type of AI technology that aims to equal or better human intellect.