One of the Leading Figures in AI Claims Current Systems Do Not Pose Existential Risk but Warns of Catastrophic Possibility in the Future

Yoshua Bengio, a professor at the Université de Montréal and one of the ‘godfathers’ of AI, has warned of the potential for things to get catastrophic with the technology in the future. Bengio, part of the three-person team that won the Turing Award in 2018 for breakthroughs in machine learning, said that today’s AI systems don’t pose an existential risk. However, as AI became more autonomous, it could usurp decision-making and thinking from human institutions. Bengio and other AI experts have called for closer global regulation of the technology and more attention to be paid to its ethics, particularly given concerns about bias, deepfakes and hallucinations it has developed. A six-month pause on advanced AI development was urged in a letter from the Future of Life Institute, whose signatories included Bengio and figures such as Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak.