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. “Intelligence gives power. So who’s going to control that power?” he said. “Having systems that know more than most people can be dangerous in the wrong hands and create more instability at a geopolitical level, for example, or terrorism.” A limited number of organizations and governments will be able to afford to build powerful AI machines, according to Bengio, and the bigger the systems are, the smarter they become.

Full story : Tech pioneer Yoshua Bengio warns of artificial intelligence risks.