Over the past month, several leading experts in the field of artificial intelligence have warned that such rapid development of technology is not beneficial, and the risks are increasing. One of the most respected experts in the field believes that artificial intelligence can destabilize democracy, and believes that this mad race in the field is a vicious circle.

Joshua Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal, is one of the world’s leading experts in the field of “deep learning.” He is also the founder of the Mill Institute of Artificial Intelligence – Quebec.

In 2018, Bengio also received the Turing Award, an honor given annually by the Association for Computing Machinery for contributions to the field of computer science. Then the prize was awarded to Bengio, as well as to Geoffrey Hinton, who recently drew attention to the dangers associated with the development of powerful AI systems.

In the Financial Times, Bengio explained why AI is risky for humanity.

Here are the main ideas.

• Governments must act quickly and issue sets of regulations for these new technologies so that the public is protected. Democracy can be destabilized if AI systems are misused.

• Companies can easily purchase access to ChatGPT, but this access must be carefully monitored to see who is using the systems and identify potential illegal use.

• The dynamics of this race between companies is a vicious circle. Bengio signed a letter calling for a six-month moratorium on the training of state-of-the-art systems, but it was understood that the moratorium would not be enforced.

• This letter showed that the opinions of experts in the field are divided, and these differences indicate that science does not have answers to many questions, for example: how AI will affect our future. “If they can’t agree, that means we don’t know… if it could be dangerous. But if we don’t know, that means we have to act to protect ourselves.”

• If we want humanity and society to face these challenges, we must not have this competition between people, companies and countries against a backdrop of very weak international coordination.”

• The number one imperative for regulators is to make AI systems more transparent, and that means verifying the data that these systems are “learning” from.

• Bengio proposes the creation of an international coalition to fund artificial intelligence research in areas that matter to the general public, such as health care or climate.