This article was syndicated from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which has covered human-made threats to humanity since 1945.
The main artery in Montreal’s Little Italy is lined with cafés, wine bars, and pastry shops that spill into tree-lined, residential side streets. Generations of farmers, butchers, bakers, and fishmongers sell farm-to-table goods in the neighborhood’s large, open-air market, the Marché Jean-Talon. But the quiet enclave also accommodates a modern, 90,000-square-foot global AI hub known as Mila–Quebec AI Institute. Mila claims to house the largest concentration of deep learning academic researchers in the world, including more than 1,000 researchers and more than 100 professors who work with more than 100 industry partners from around the globe.
Yoshua Bengio, Mila’s scientific director, is a pioneer in artificial neural networks and deep learning—an approach to machine learning inspired by the brain. In 2018, Bengio, Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, and former Google AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton received the Turing Award—known as the Nobel of computing—for “conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing.” Together, the three computer scientists are known as the “godfathers of AI.”
In July, Bengio spoke to a US Senate subcommittee that is considering possible legislation to regulate the fast-evolving technology. There, he explained that he and other top AI researchers have revised their estimates for when artificial intelligence could achieve human levels of broad cognitive competence.
“Previously thought to be decades or even centuries away, we now believe it could be within a few years or decades,” Bengio told the senators. “The shorter time frame, say five years, is really worrisome, because we will need more time to effectively mitigate the potentially significant threats to democracy, national security, and our collective future.”
Last month, on a day when temperatures in Montreal soared past 90 degrees Fahrenheit, Bengio and I sat down in his office to discuss nuance in attention-grabbing headlines about AI, taboos among AI researchers, and why top AI researchers may disagree about the risks AI pose to humanity. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Susan D’Agostino: A BBC headline in May of this year declared that you felt “lost” over your life’s work. But you wrote in your blog that you never made this statement. Still, you appear to be reflecting deeply. How would you characterize what you’re going through?
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