there is still a very- large gap that we observe between the capability of ai systems and what we observe in animals and humans. and, basically, the quest of my life has been to bridge this gap, - trying to figure out, l what are we missing? what type of intelligence do| humans and animal exhibit? and there s good news. we re making a lot of progress, and it s accelerating. they ve become known as the godfathers of ai. ai is about building machines that are intelligent. now, what does it mean to be intelligent? people may disagree. but the way i and many others like to define it is, the ability to learn, to understand and to take decisions. the godfathers laid the foundations for machines that could learn. what would power the next step was data but on a scale
was yoshua bengio. the existential risk that people talk about really is about what happens if we create machines that are smarter than us and have their own goals that are not aligned with our needs and could potentially harm us, just like a new species on earth that would be smarter than us might do. but the godfathers of ai don t always agree. professor lecun didn t sign the statement. every powerful technology can be used for good or bad. the existence of bad actors is not new. i i but very often the technology that l enables bad actors to do bad things is the same one that actually - enables to protect against them. a very simple example that exists today - there are people who are trying to use social networks, - like facebook and instagram and others, to disseminate i disinformation to corrupt the political process, - the democratic process.
things included in there. so, part of this really gets to the core production ethos of how al s made, which is, collect it all and figure it out later. if machines are learning from what s on the internet, material that s harmful needs to be filtered out, and much of that work still needs the scrutiny and judgment of humans. well, there are certainly countries where this type of outsourced labour is most commonly located. china, malaysia, kenya are some examples. but, indeed, it s a growing market for people to be, really, doing this extremely difficult, extremely traumatising work. so, in a sense, you know, it maps to a global north global south dynamic of extraction and exploitation of labour for these systems.
i think it s good to imagine the worst, because that s the best way to avoid it. but i don t think that the worst possible thing is necessarily the most probable thing. i think the biggest danger is not what machines will do to people, but what people will do with machines to other people. that s the story, notjust of technology, that s the history of humanity. machines are getting smarter, and ai is now all around us. butjust because it can do something doesn t mean it should. and maybe the question is, how will we live alongside the machines that could become smarter than us?