Source: AFP
Rapid advances in artificial intelligence — and the recent upheaval in the OpenAI powerhouse industry — have brought new attention to a key technology-related ethics research center in Montreal, led by Canadian “godfather of artificial intelligence” Yoshua Bengio.
Bengio – who in 2018 shared the Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun for their work in deep learning – says he worries about technology surpassing human intelligence and abilities in the not-too-distant future.
Speaking to AFP at his home in Montreal, the professor warned that developments in artificial intelligence are moving at breakneck speed and risk “creating a new species capable of making decisions that harm or even endanger humans.”
OpenAI’s recent firing and subsequent rehiring of CEO Sam Altman, who has been accused of downplaying the risks in his push to push the ChatGPT bot, shows some of the turmoil in the startup sector and the fierce competition in fight commercialization of genetic artificial intelligence.
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For some time now, Bengio has warned of companies moving too fast without guardrails, “potentially at the expense of the public.”
It is important, he said, to have “rules to be followed by all companies”.
At a world-first AI summit in Britain in early November, Bengio took it upon himself to lead a team that produced an inaugural report on AI security.
The aim is to set priorities to inform future work on cutting edge technology security.
Society and AI
The renowned AI academic has amassed a “critical mass of AI researchers” (1,000+) through his research institute Mila, located in a former working-class neighborhood of Montreal.
Its neighbors include AI research facilities of US tech giants Microsoft, Meta, IBM and Google.
Source: AFP
“This concentration of AI experts, which is bigger than anywhere else in the world,” is what attracted Google, says Hugo Larochelle, the hooded chief scientific officer of the Silicon Valley giant’s AI subsidiary Deepmind .
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Early on, these researchers began thinking about the future of artificial intelligence, and consultations with the public and researchers from all disciplines led in 2018 to a world map of artificial intelligence called the Montreal Declaration for a Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence.
“We knew early on that the scientific community needed to think about the integration of artificial intelligence into society,” explained Guillaume Macaux, vice president of OBVIA, an international observatory that studies the social implications of artificial intelligence.
Its 220 researchers advise government policies and raise public awareness of the potential positive and negative effects of this cutting-edge technology.
Art that demystifies artificial intelligence
Source: AFP
Artists also play a role in “demystifying artificial intelligence,” says Sandra Rodriguez, who splits her time making art in Montreal and teaching digital media at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States.
She showed AFP her latest art installation.
Entering an exciting futuristic world through a virtual reality (VR) headset, audiences can chat with a bot inspired by American linguist Noam Chomsky.
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Voice and text responses to queries appear simultaneously. At the touch of a finger, lists of alternative answers are displayed that the artificial intelligence considers with the relevant percentage rating.
“You quickly realize that it’s really just an algorithm,” Rodriguez said.
Source: AFP
“Montreal is a fantastic playground” for exploring the possibilities and limits of artificial intelligence, as well as “discussing (relevant) ethical and social issues,” he told AFP.
According to Rodriguez, art is becoming “more necessary than ever” to invite “a wider audience to ask questions about the AI issues that will affect them tomorrow.”
Source: AFP