{"id":5656,"date":"2025-10-03T03:02:21","date_gmt":"2025-10-03T03:02:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/yoshua-bengio-ai-extinction\/"},"modified":"2025-10-03T03:02:21","modified_gmt":"2025-10-03T03:02:21","slug":"yoshua-bengio-ai-extinction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/yoshua-bengio-ai-extinction\/","title":{"rendered":"Godfather of AI Says We\u2019re Barreling Straight Toward Human Extinction"},"content":{"rendered":"
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University of Montreal professor Yoshua <\/strong>Bengio is considered one of the \u201cgodfathers of AI,\u201d whose academic work set the groundwork for today\u2019s red hot AI arms race. He\u2019s <\/strong>also <\/strong>the founder and scientific adviser of Mila, an AI research institute in Quebec, and recently launched a <\/strong>nonprofit research organization called LawZero, where he plans on developing ways to build safe AI models.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now, <\/strong>in a new conversation with the Wall Street Journal<\/em><\/a>, Bengio didn\u2019t mince his words: at this rate, he believes we\u2019re headed down a dark path that could lead to the end of humankind.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we build machines that are way smarter than us and have their own preservation goals, that\u2019s dangerous,\u201d he told the paper. \u201cIt\u2019s like creating a competitor to humanity that is smarter than us.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cThe thing with catastrophic events like extinction, and even less radical events that are still catastrophic like destroying our democracies, is that they\u2019re so bad that even if there was only a 1 <\/strong>percent chance it could happen, it\u2019s not acceptable,\u201d he continued.<\/p>\n

Back in 2023, Bengio and hundreds of other AI experts called for a moratorium<\/a> <\/strong>on developing AI, saying the research community needed time to establish and standardize safety and ethical protocols. That never happened: rather than listen to concerned luminaries of the field, ambitious founders and their investors continued pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into advancing AI models.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As AI has gotten stronger, Bengio worries that it\u2019s learning to behave deceitfully because it\u2019s been <\/strong>trained to \u201cmostly imitate humans,\u201d who will themselves \u201clie and deceive and will try to protect themselves.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The <\/strong>result can be all too human: AI that acts in its own self-interest above that of its creators.<\/p>\n

\u201cRecent experiments show that in some circumstances where the AI has no choice but between its preservation,\u201d Bengio told the WSJ<\/em>, \u201cwhich means the goals that it was given, and doing something that causes the death of a human, they might choose the death of the human to preserve their goals.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to fixate on \u201cTerminator\u201d-esque scenarios of rogue AI turning on humankind in a grand way, but Bengio warned that the risks could be subtler escalations of the misinformation and manipulation we\u2019ve seen for years on social media \u2014 or, rather than gaining any particular agency of its own, AI could end up being one more tool that humans use to hurt other humans.<\/p>\n

\u201c[AI] could influence people through persuasion, through threats, through manipulation of public opinion,\u201d he fretted to the paper. \u201cThere are all sorts of ways that they can get things to be done in the world through people. Like, for example, helping a terrorist build a virus that could create new pandemics that could be very dangerous for us.\u201d<\/p>\n

More on AI and humanity:<\/strong> Government Test Finds That AI Wildly Underperforms Compared to Human Employees<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The post Godfather of AI Says We\u2019re Barreling Straight Toward Human Extinction<\/a> appeared first on Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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University of Montreal professor Yoshua Bengio is considered one of the \u201cgodfathers of AI,\u201d whose academic work set the groundwork for today\u2019s red hot AI arms race. He\u2019s also the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177,3841],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","category-ethics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5656"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5656\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}