Yoshua Bengio has been thinking for a while about what happens if the technology he helped pioneer becomes smarter than humans — and escapes our control.
“We could basically create new types of living entities that have their own preservation as a more important value than our own,” he said.
Entities, he worries, that, with the aid of robots, could one day “roam the planet.”
But Bengio, who is scientific director of Mila, the Montreal-based artificial intelligence institute he founded in 1993, is increasingly contemplating political solutions to head off such a sinister scenario.
At home in his spacious but unpretentious 1950s residence on
