LETTER FROM MONTRÉAL
A giant tinfoil robot resembling Star Wars' R2-D2 sat on stage, lending a vintage flair to the event organized by C2 Montréal, an annual business conference that bills itself as the "Davos of creativity." But on May 24, the discussion addressing the theme of "Artificial intelligence, democracy and the future of civilization" was far more distressing than the space opera dreamed up by George Lucas. This new technology poses threats of displacement and domination that are scarcely the stuff of science fiction. "They are right in front of us, right here, right now," as the two leading experts on the subject kept repeating.
Among the whistleblowers that day was one of the very fathers of artificial intelligence, Yoshua Bengio, winner of the 2019 Turing Award, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for computer science. The 59-year-old Québec professor is also a founder and scientific director of Mila, the Montréal-based Institut québécois d'intelligence artificielle (Québécois Institute for Artificial Intelligence), a critical organization that brings university researchers specializing in deep learning together with industry players. "It's a unique ecosystem, which at its inception, in 1993, made an ethical choice: 'AI for the good', artificial intelligence for the good of everyone," said Stéphane Paquet, president of Montréal International, an organization designed to attract foreign investment to the Québec metropolitan area.
British-Canadian computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton has broadly contributed to the development of AI through his work on artificial neural networks. At the beginning of May, this co-recipient of the 2019 Turing Award decided to resign from Google in order to speak freely about the dangers posed by AI. Based in Québec, Hinton, considered to be one of the "godfathers" of AI, has been warning the public about the risks posed by the accelerated development of their "baby." Standing on stage, he explained how the technology was now at a "tipping point." Having imparted some of our intelligence to machines, we now face the prospect that from here on they may flourish, endowed with intelligence equal to, and no doubt soon to become superior to, that of humans. "We don't know if this will happen. But if it does, we'll be talking about an existential threat. Imagine a new species so intelligent that it looks at us the way we look at frogs today. Do we treat frogs right?" he said uneasily.
'More powerful than a tyrannosaurus'
Historian and best-selling author Yuval Noah Harari, who wrote Sapiens, une brève histoire de l'humanité (Sapiens: A brief history of humankind; Albin Michel 2015), joined via videoconference from Israel. He was equally alarmist: "Consider that, at its current stage of development, artificial intelligence is equivalent in stature to an amoeba, but could very quickly become more powerful than a tyrannosaurus." He called attention to the enormous gap separating this new technology, referred to as "generative," from the progress that mankind has made up till now. "The flint knife and the atomic bomb still needed a person to decide whether to use them or not. But AI is now capable of making decisions, so it is in a position to take some of our power away."
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