The catastrophic risks of AI — and a safer path | Yoshua Bengio
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You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. When one of the leaders in the field of artificial intelligence tells you to be scared of what's ahead, well, I listened. Computer scientist, Yoshua Bengio, is at the forefront of deep learning research and AI development. And he's also a leading voice in the effort to reduce the potential risks of superhuman AI. He shares why the world should treat the risk of extinction from AI as a global priority alongside pandemics and nuclear war. And stick around after the talk for a brief Q&A between Yoshua and head of TED, Chris Anderson.
When my son Patrick was around three, four years old, I came regularly into his playroom, and he was playing with these blocks with letters. I wanted him to learn to read eventually. And one day, he said, and I said, and he said, and I said, and then he said, Whee! Yes! And then something wondrous happened. He picked up the blocks again and said, Pa, Patrick, eureka! His eurekas were feeding my scientific eurekas. His doors, our doors, were opening to expanded capabilities, expanded agency and joy. Can you imagine a world without human joy? I really wouldn't want that. So I'm going to tell you also about AI capabilities and AI agency, so that we can avoid a future where human joy is gone. My name is Yashua Bengio.
I'm a computer scientist. My research has been foundational to the development of AI as we know it today. My colleagues and I earned top prices in our field. People call me a godfather of AI. I'm not sure how I feel about that name, but I do feel a responsibility to talk to you about the potentially catastrophic risks of AI. To really understand where we might be going, we have to look back where we started from. About 15, 20 years ago, with my students, we were developing the early days of deep learning, and our systems were barely able to recognize handwritten characters. But then, a few years later, they were able to recognize objects in images. And a couple more years, they were able to translate across all the major languages.
In 2012, tech companies understood the amazing commercial potential of this nascent technology, and many of my colleagues moved from university to industry. I decided to stay in academia. I wanted AI to be developed for good. I worked on applications in medicine for medical diagnosis, climate, to get better carbon capture. I had a dream. January 2023, I'm with Clarence, my grandson, and he's playing with the same old toys. And I'm playing with my new toy, the first version of ChatGPT. It's very exciting, because for the first time, we have AI that seems to master language. ChatGPT is on everybody's lips in every home. And at some point, I realized this is happening faster than I anticipated. And I'm starting to think about what it could mean for the future.
We thought AI would happen in decades or centuries. but it might be just in a few years. And I saw how it could go wrong, because we didn't and we still don't have ways to make sure this technology eventually doesn't turn against us. So two months later, I'm a leading signatory of the pause letter, where we and 30,000 other people ask the AI labs to wait six months before building the next version. As you can guess, nobody paused. Then, with the same people and the leading executives of the AI labs, I signed a statement. And the statement goes, mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority. I then testify in front of the US Senate about those risks. I travel the world to talk about it.
I'm the most cited computer scientist in the world, and you'd think that people would heed my warnings. Hundreds of billions of dollars are being invested every year on developing this technology, and this is growing. And these companies have a stated goal of building machines that will be smarter than us, that can replace human labor. Yet we still don't know how to make sure they won't turn against us.
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