> "has raised concerns about the possible risks from misuse of technology"
Isn't misuse possible in all (or, at least, almost all) technology?
Drugs can change humor, physical condition, hormones, and I think can be miused even as a long-term weapon over the population of some nation.
Nuclear. Explosives. Social medias. TV programs. Data processing with punch cards. Drones. Knifes. Herbicides. Small plastic rejects.
I understand the reasons Bengio tries to make, but it seems that it is the same problem with all technological stuff: someone, somewhere, will find a way to use it against others, and will cause minor or giant consequences.
Most of your examples are covered by rules and regulation in order to try to get the most out of the technology without too much adverse effects. The point here is that we should do the same for "AI", and that we should start thinking about this now.
Not a secret that largest military companies are actively investing into AI. Enormous opportunities and dangers. And it's not just computer vision and robotics - almost every aspect of modern warfare will be AI-extended.
> People from outside Canada are coming to Canada to do research in AI.
This is true. As a resident of Montreal, I can attest to the fact that we've become THE hub when it comes to AI research and development.
Specialists are moving up here en mass to do their thing.
It's the same story in all new tech breakthroughs: the rich and powerful are already leveraging AI and the complete lack of regulation to geometrically explode their hoardes and power, everyone else not so much. Acting like this is some far off future event is absurd, people are already making trillions of dollars off of AI and personal data.
AI is like a mountain. No matter what humanity does, someone will summit just because it's there. We can control businesses to an extent, but a curious person in the basement, no one has control over that.
And good luck holding the military back.
One way or another humanity is on its way to the inevitable, and it's our evolutionary destiny because we are basically hard-wired to pursue the curiosity that is AI.
I think there was once a yogi or guru-type that criticized the denuclearization effort saying why get rid of nukes if we still have the mindset that can justify using them?
I can't help but think the same is true of AI or any technology that could be used for good or bad.
We spend a lot of time trying to control the tools, but less time trying to improve culture and ethics of the operator.
Yes we do. You change the social goals. A materialist society will always bring us to the brink of destruction. Also, having poverty and fear loom over people is a terrible idea for the basis of a civil society.
How do you make the majority of the society believe in the same social goals without resorting to tales a-la Christianity during the fall of Roman Empire?
I have to admit that there might not even be a way to do that otherwise.
You'll either need to make the whole of the humanity live in the sorts of Star Trek universe, where everyone is equally educated and is equally capable to critical thinking.
Or you end up with the same system where the majority of people are obliged to give their absolute trust to the minority.
> How do you make the majority of the society believe in the same social goals without resorting to tales a-la Christianity during the fall of Roman Empire?
In my opinion this is the key question.: How do we get everybody on board with e.g. UN Sustainable Development Goals[1] or something like them?
>> there was once a yogi or guru-type that criticized the denuclearization effort saying why get rid of nukes if we still have the mindset that can justify using them
Probably because politicians are more aware of the realities of _current_ human nature rather than some future hypothetical that may never happen at all.
Also there's an important point to be made that the powers that actually owned the majority of nuclear arsenal on the planet had enough missiles to destroy most of the human civilization.
The amount of resources and thus damage that an individual in a basement can do is rather limited.
We got treaties on nuclear and chemical weapons. It could happen for autonomous weapons and weaponized intelligent agents also. But it might require a serious case of abuse before we get there, as it did for chemical and nuclear...
Right. Currently in order to do state-of-the-art AI, you need a lot of _computers_ and a lot of _data_. Neither of these is easy to obtain by an individual in a basement.
We would need to consider, however, access to finished products (like trained models). In some cases in the future, having access to the appropriate model might be as dangerous as handing someone a nuke.
How hard would it be for someone to assemble a indiscriminate "killer drone," given the appropriate image recognition and flight control models?
Image recognition and flight control makes a drone, but probably not a killer drone, as that would presumably require some sort of munitions - like a gun or explosives. So it might be efficient enough to just limit access to those parts?
People with low education levels can show you how to build all sorts of things that go bang. Someone with an engineering background could vastly improve on a lot of designs. If you could make a small, lightweight projectile weapon that can be 3d printed then you have what you need.
My background is an engineering role in the military and my current path is CS. I don't think it's unfeasible that an individual could build a crude drone that would kill a single person. Building an entire swarm of death robots is a different story.
>The amount of resources and thus damage that an individual in a basement can do is rather limited.
It is for now. We will get to a point where a negative utilitarian with accesses to genome synthesis technology will be able to kill tens of millions. And this seems like it could become pretty feasible, even from a basement.
It is really easy to detect nuclear abuse. It's somewhat harder to detect chemical abuse. I have no idea how you're going to detect AI abuse without pretty much spying on everyone.
The article fails to support this level of alarmism. Yes, it can be abused, but it's just a statistical modeling technique. Even linear correlation can be abused as well, vis a vis the replication crisis in the social sciences.
The danger of AI abuse is that existing large, powerful entities will put too much faith in statistical models without understanding their limitations, and will make bad decisions that harm people. Fortunately we have a filtering function -- entities that use these techniques with more nuance will slowly replace the failing ones because they are making better decisions. There will be a long transition as governments desperately try to save the dinosaurs from the consequences of their poor decision making, but if they can't make the transition, they're going to cease being relevant.
AI abuse is just statistical abuse. If a bank has a model based on ten years of real estate data that says, "hey, real estate increases in value, we should leverage into that", then come 2008 they'll find that things that their neat statistical model stated don't work any more. That's all the "dangers of abuse" are.
> The article fails to support this level of alarmism
Maybe you missed the section where he said "Killer drones are a big concern." and "A lot of what is most concerning is not happening in broad daylight. It’s happening in military labs, in security organizations, in private companies providing services to governments or the police."
This is a spot on analysis. The danger is not that the system itself is too powerful, it's that powerful entities are putting so much faith in these systems that when they fail it's catastrophic
You talk as if AI is something a person can "make" in their garage. I don't buy this for a minute. You can argue the exact same thing about, say, nuclear weapons. But people making nukes in their garage is not a real problem because such a complex project with a lot of niche resources is not attainable in a garage. Curiosity doesn't mean anything if you need decades of mathematics, CS, statistics and neuroscience research as well as thousands of human hours of programming to achieve something.
I think a better analogy might be to computer security. Script kiddies exist. You don't necessarily need to do a lot of research if you can learn to use open source tools. It won't be state of the art, but that's not necessary to do damage.
These days there are a lot of high school kids messing around with machine learning. They might not have the theoretical understanding, but I don't think it will require a graduate degree to get there.
I'm not sure why there aren't more hacker tools that apply machine learning? Maybe we're not quite there yet.
Script kiddies do things that anyone doing research or work in computer security can do if they spend time on it. They are not doing new things. AGI is a completely different beast and has still not been achieved after research done by very smart and experienced people with millions of dollars in funding. It's almost ridiculous to compare these things.
It's ridiculous to compare by today's standards but what about a script kiddie in the year 2100? 2200? If it is truly beyond a single individual then what about a small rogue nation like North Korea?
You are wrong. At least when it comes to AGI, which is the only kind of AI that really needs to be prevented from existing. Your conclusions are based on fuzzy thinking and extrapolating old and irrelevant data.
We can control businesses. And as for someone in their basement, it isn’t clear at all that one could develop AGI in their basement. AGIs discovery will probably require massive, massive amounts of compute. More than could fit in a basement or be powered by domestic grid connections without drawing attention.
Good luck holding the military back? You are talking about the US right? The military and every other government entity answers to the people either directly or indirectly. If enough ordinary people wanted it, the constitution of the United States itself could be amended into the ITunes terms of service. And since AGI is to the detriment of literally every human being on the planet, I think some basic legislation might be able to be passed.
Don’t succumb to these notions of hopelessness. They are wrong. And you even spread them around which just makes solving the problem even harder.
This is so wrong. “AI” could consist of super sophisticated flying drones with powerful lasers and the ability to self replicate and a mission to kill all detected life. If these were the only things it were capable of it would destroy most of us. Are we anywhere near that? Not now - but we are way closer to that reality than that reality would be to “AGI.”
> You have expressed concern that corporations have ‘stolen’ talent from academia.
Nobody is stealing anything. What they don’t realize is that the free market will incentivize AI researchers to go to the private sector. It’s just simple economics.
If private industry are using inflated (in the short term) valuations and low tax rates to fund a talent war, but publicly funded educational institutions can't compete by increasing funding (through governments raising taxes or printing money), then the playing field isn't exactly level, is it?
Publicly funded educational institutions can compete by reassigning some of their budget dedicated to sports and administrative roles to their researchers, for starters.
For instance, the public US university I attended for grad school has an endowment of about $1B, and spent ~$150M on athletics in the past year. A post doc salary there is about $40k a year.
Why would anyone take this over $200k a year (with lots of sweet perks) at eg Google? Because they are passionate about academic research (and potentially teaching), something that the university is very aware of and has no problem using to their advantage.
Talking about level playing fields here seems disingenuous.
> Publicly funded educational institutions can compete by reassigning some of their budget dedicated to sports
Athletics programs are a huge driver of both alumni donations and student enrollment. Unfortunately. Not to mention licensing revenue from apparel and the like.
> Because they are passionate about academic research (and potentially teaching), something that the university is very aware of and has no problem using to their advantage.
This was more effective when the pay disparity was smaller.
Really. Because "they" are not "Yoshua Bengio". "They" are the journalists.
In a link from this quote:
"You have expressed concern that corporations have ‘stolen’ talent from academia. Is this still an issue?"
https://www.nature.com/news/ai-talent-grab-sparks-excitement...
I can't find a word "stolen" or anything similar being used at all.
Seems like it was introduced by a journalist who wrote final article. And considering that, it's not hard to believe that this journalist may have some opinions on economics that are far from reality, that (probably unconsciously) triggered his word-twisting reflex.
> The loss of expertise in academia concerns Yoshua Bengio, a computer scientist at the University of Montreal in Canada, which has also seen a surge in graduate-student applications. If industry-hired faculty members do retain university roles — as Hinton has at the University of Toronto and Ng has at Stanford University in California — they are usually only minor, says Bengio.
So it's obvious he's not concerned about corporations literally "stealing" students and faculty somehow, like unmarked vans and burly men in black turtlenecks, eh?
> And considering that, it's not hard to believe that this journalist may have some opinions on economics that are far from reality, that (probably unconsciously) triggered his word-twisting reflex.
We don't know exact question asked. And even if it contained exact "stealing" phrasing, it's possible mr. Bengio simply decided to ignore connotation for sake of productive conversation. It's clear both we and him are aware of brain drain happening but, he also have noticed mutual beneficial effects of the facts and I my personal believe is that had he felt important to object, he would, but he didn't. But that doesn't say much to support he believes it's unfair competition
I'm not sure where you're going with this, but my only point here is that it's silly for the OP to say that Bengio and/or the author of the piece somehow didn't understand that "more money" is part of the reason why people leave academia for industry. It was a stupid goddamned comment.
Nobody is stealing anything. What they don't realize is that the free market will incentivize people to liberate your valuables into the private sector when gains are better than the potential losses. It's just simple economics.
Obviously facetious, but "stealing" is not some axiomatic boolean that never changes. It's judged differently by different societies depending on time, circumstances, and ideas.
"Raiding" employees was common place. Now there are non-raid agreements. If non-raid agreements became very ubiquitous it would be considered stealing.
Working employees 100 hour weeks with no overtime was commonplace. Now there are labor laws. It would be considered wage theft and exactly "stealing" if you did it today.
"Simple economics" gives you no guidelines to judge any of these things "stealing" or "not stealing".
“Stealing”, in the USA in 2019, is a statutory offense punishable by law.
Making a job offer to an academic that they accept isn’t a statutory offense punishable by law, and therefore is not stealing, no matter how much you play with semantics.
Yes, and if an academic in an interview brought up boyfriend theft as a concern, it would be as ridiculous as this statement is.
Don’t worry about the phenomenon itself, which is 2 entities acting legally and of their own volition. Worry about the systems at play that enable the phenomenon. Universities are clearly not compensating (whether in terms of raw dollars or benefits) AI researchers sufficiently. That’s what one should be concerned about, not “theft” of AI researchers.
Maybe that's a failure of the market? If the market is pushing people to do things that aren't what we want then "its the free market" isn't a defense.
Bengio is asked: What will be the next big thing in AI?
> "Deep learning, as it is now, has made huge progress in perception, but it hasn’t delivered yet on systems that can discover high-level representations — the kind of concepts we use in language. Humans are able to use those high-level concepts to generalize in powerful ways. That’s something that even babies can do, but machine learning is very bad at."
I read this as: "We have super-advanced skip-logic software that can produce specific results when provided a large enough data set, but "intelligence" as it is defined, does not exist."
AI is really just sophisticated software algorithms.
In my opinion, there is no true artificial intelligence, and it will be unlikely that we will ever create such a thing for quite some time, if at all. AI is being used as a buzzword to garner attention.
It seems much more likely that we will build a brain-computer interface before true AI, and it will prove more efficient than what we have today, which is effectively many computers churning through a super-long list of "if-then" statements.
Meanwhile, Google has cancelled its AI ethics board in response to an internal employee petition complaining about a mainstream conservative being included in the 8-member committee.
It means you can't assume the Heritage representative is going to participate in good faith. They are bringing a religious agenda to the table, which has (or at least should have) no place in the discussion.
Heritage actively campaigns in the US and supports people in the U.K. who work against trans rights. Yes they do oppose my existence they just wrap it up in statements about “freedom of debate” or “women’s safety” even when those aren’t actual issues.
It always seems like FUD to me when I read these articles. What is the specific concern? Can we get some examples? Sometimes people are like oh no AI is gonna take over! And I just think about how hard it is for humans to integrate two software systems and laugh. What are we afraid of it doing? If it gets out of control can’t we just you know... cut the power?
"Killer drones are a big concern....dangers of abuse, especially by authoritarian governments...AI can amplify discrimination and biases".
Bengio is specifically talking about malicious actors using AI. So saying "just unplug it" isn't really applicable, especially when it comes to governments.
my original point was already a response to your quote from the article, what is there to expound on? the problem isn’t an AI problem it’s a malicious actor problem
FUD is a really stupid term. If there is any fear or uncertainty or doubt present in someone’s remark, then they are “FUD?” You could say that about almost anything. “I don’t think it would be a good idea to ride our bikes into that forest pathway because there seem to be lots of trees to run into and it probably isn’t kept up so there may be potholes and generally the whole thing doesn’t sit well with me.” “That’s just FUD, I’m going in.” This is the classic childhood story where one kid was smart enough to not go in and the other kid ends up with a broken arm and a concussion. My point is that not everything can be mathematically proven to be bad. Sometimes you have to reason about it and you have to deal with uncertainty. You can’t solve every problem by trying it out. Some things are better to not try. And AGI is the best example of that maybe ever.
With AGI the burden is on the proponents to prove beyond any doubt that AGI is completely safe. The burden is not on its detractors to prove that it will be bad for humanity. It’s only logical. If I am wrong and we abstain then we lose nothing. If you are wrong then we lose everything.
Bored with AI 'experts' telling us it's dangerous.
Unless they want to specifically explain out a danger, they add nothing that any kids who's seen The Terminator can do.
> Killer drones are a big concern. There is a moral question, and a security question
Other than your morality, which I don't care about, what specifically could happen? Be specific else it's pure FUD.
NK could have introduced Ebola to the USA for decades, but they don't. So they, along with the rest of the countries, aren't going to 'just' introduce 'killer' drones.
75 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] threadIsn't misuse possible in all (or, at least, almost all) technology?
Drugs can change humor, physical condition, hormones, and I think can be miused even as a long-term weapon over the population of some nation.
Nuclear. Explosives. Social medias. TV programs. Data processing with punch cards. Drones. Knifes. Herbicides. Small plastic rejects.
I understand the reasons Bengio tries to make, but it seems that it is the same problem with all technological stuff: someone, somewhere, will find a way to use it against others, and will cause minor or giant consequences.
This is true. As a resident of Montreal, I can attest to the fact that we've become THE hub when it comes to AI research and development. Specialists are moving up here en mass to do their thing.
And good luck holding the military back.
One way or another humanity is on its way to the inevitable, and it's our evolutionary destiny because we are basically hard-wired to pursue the curiosity that is AI.
I can't help but think the same is true of AI or any technology that could be used for good or bad.
We spend a lot of time trying to control the tools, but less time trying to improve culture and ethics of the operator.
How do you make the majority of the society believe in the same social goals without resorting to tales a-la Christianity during the fall of Roman Empire?
You'll either need to make the whole of the humanity live in the sorts of Star Trek universe, where everyone is equally educated and is equally capable to critical thinking.
Or you end up with the same system where the majority of people are obliged to give their absolute trust to the minority.
In my opinion this is the key question.: How do we get everybody on board with e.g. UN Sustainable Development Goals[1] or something like them?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Development_Goals
Probably because politicians are more aware of the realities of _current_ human nature rather than some future hypothetical that may never happen at all.
Also there's an important point to be made that the powers that actually owned the majority of nuclear arsenal on the planet had enough missiles to destroy most of the human civilization.
We got treaties on nuclear and chemical weapons. It could happen for autonomous weapons and weaponized intelligent agents also. But it might require a serious case of abuse before we get there, as it did for chemical and nuclear...
We would need to consider, however, access to finished products (like trained models). In some cases in the future, having access to the appropriate model might be as dangerous as handing someone a nuke.
How hard would it be for someone to assemble a indiscriminate "killer drone," given the appropriate image recognition and flight control models?
My background is an engineering role in the military and my current path is CS. I don't think it's unfeasible that an individual could build a crude drone that would kill a single person. Building an entire swarm of death robots is a different story.
It is for now. We will get to a point where a negative utilitarian with accesses to genome synthesis technology will be able to kill tens of millions. And this seems like it could become pretty feasible, even from a basement.
The danger of AI abuse is that existing large, powerful entities will put too much faith in statistical models without understanding their limitations, and will make bad decisions that harm people. Fortunately we have a filtering function -- entities that use these techniques with more nuance will slowly replace the failing ones because they are making better decisions. There will be a long transition as governments desperately try to save the dinosaurs from the consequences of their poor decision making, but if they can't make the transition, they're going to cease being relevant.
AI abuse is just statistical abuse. If a bank has a model based on ten years of real estate data that says, "hey, real estate increases in value, we should leverage into that", then come 2008 they'll find that things that their neat statistical model stated don't work any more. That's all the "dangers of abuse" are.
Maybe you missed the section where he said "Killer drones are a big concern." and "A lot of what is most concerning is not happening in broad daylight. It’s happening in military labs, in security organizations, in private companies providing services to governments or the police."
> it's just a statistical modeling technique
...and gunpowder is just a chemical.
These days there are a lot of high school kids messing around with machine learning. They might not have the theoretical understanding, but I don't think it will require a graduate degree to get there.
I'm not sure why there aren't more hacker tools that apply machine learning? Maybe we're not quite there yet.
We can control businesses. And as for someone in their basement, it isn’t clear at all that one could develop AGI in their basement. AGIs discovery will probably require massive, massive amounts of compute. More than could fit in a basement or be powered by domestic grid connections without drawing attention.
Good luck holding the military back? You are talking about the US right? The military and every other government entity answers to the people either directly or indirectly. If enough ordinary people wanted it, the constitution of the United States itself could be amended into the ITunes terms of service. And since AGI is to the detriment of literally every human being on the planet, I think some basic legislation might be able to be passed.
Don’t succumb to these notions of hopelessness. They are wrong. And you even spread them around which just makes solving the problem even harder.
Nobody is stealing anything. What they don’t realize is that the free market will incentivize AI researchers to go to the private sector. It’s just simple economics.
For instance, the public US university I attended for grad school has an endowment of about $1B, and spent ~$150M on athletics in the past year. A post doc salary there is about $40k a year.
Why would anyone take this over $200k a year (with lots of sweet perks) at eg Google? Because they are passionate about academic research (and potentially teaching), something that the university is very aware of and has no problem using to their advantage.
Talking about level playing fields here seems disingenuous.
Athletics programs are a huge driver of both alumni donations and student enrollment. Unfortunately. Not to mention licensing revenue from apparel and the like.
> Because they are passionate about academic research (and potentially teaching), something that the university is very aware of and has no problem using to their advantage.
This was more effective when the pay disparity was smaller.
Really?
I wish we would give people a chance before we dismiss people as dumb/.. .
In a link from this quote: "You have expressed concern that corporations have ‘stolen’ talent from academia. Is this still an issue?" https://www.nature.com/news/ai-talent-grab-sparks-excitement... I can't find a word "stolen" or anything similar being used at all.
Seems like it was introduced by a journalist who wrote final article. And considering that, it's not hard to believe that this journalist may have some opinions on economics that are far from reality, that (probably unconsciously) triggered his word-twisting reflex.
> "It’s continuing. ..."
So he's not objecting to the phrasing, eh?
The linked article has this:
> The loss of expertise in academia concerns Yoshua Bengio, a computer scientist at the University of Montreal in Canada, which has also seen a surge in graduate-student applications. If industry-hired faculty members do retain university roles — as Hinton has at the University of Toronto and Ng has at Stanford University in California — they are usually only minor, says Bengio.
So it's obvious he's not concerned about corporations literally "stealing" students and faculty somehow, like unmarked vans and burly men in black turtlenecks, eh?
> And considering that, it's not hard to believe that this journalist may have some opinions on economics that are far from reality, that (probably unconsciously) triggered his word-twisting reflex.
The word "stealing" is in quotes in TFA.
Obviously facetious, but "stealing" is not some axiomatic boolean that never changes. It's judged differently by different societies depending on time, circumstances, and ideas.
"Raiding" employees was common place. Now there are non-raid agreements. If non-raid agreements became very ubiquitous it would be considered stealing.
Working employees 100 hour weeks with no overtime was commonplace. Now there are labor laws. It would be considered wage theft and exactly "stealing" if you did it today.
"Simple economics" gives you no guidelines to judge any of these things "stealing" or "not stealing".
Making a job offer to an academic that they accept isn’t a statutory offense punishable by law, and therefore is not stealing, no matter how much you play with semantics.
Don’t worry about the phenomenon itself, which is 2 entities acting legally and of their own volition. Worry about the systems at play that enable the phenomenon. Universities are clearly not compensating (whether in terms of raw dollars or benefits) AI researchers sufficiently. That’s what one should be concerned about, not “theft” of AI researchers.
> "Deep learning, as it is now, has made huge progress in perception, but it hasn’t delivered yet on systems that can discover high-level representations — the kind of concepts we use in language. Humans are able to use those high-level concepts to generalize in powerful ways. That’s something that even babies can do, but machine learning is very bad at."
I read this as: "We have super-advanced skip-logic software that can produce specific results when provided a large enough data set, but "intelligence" as it is defined, does not exist."
AI is really just sophisticated software algorithms.
In my opinion, there is no true artificial intelligence, and it will be unlikely that we will ever create such a thing for quite some time, if at all. AI is being used as a buzzword to garner attention.
It seems much more likely that we will build a brain-computer interface before true AI, and it will prove more efficient than what we have today, which is effectively many computers churning through a super-long list of "if-then" statements.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jilliandonfro/2019/04/04/google...
I for one and fking sick and tired of my existence being subject to debate due in part to these groups.
When AI starts being used t decide who to hire or if someone should be offered a rental then what happens when it is biased against LGBT folk?
https://www.heritage.org/civil-society/commentary/dont-typec...
Heritage actively campaigns in the US and supports people in the U.K. who work against trans rights. Yes they do oppose my existence they just wrap it up in statements about “freedom of debate” or “women’s safety” even when those aren’t actual issues.
"Killer drones are a big concern....dangers of abuse, especially by authoritarian governments...AI can amplify discrimination and biases".
Bengio is specifically talking about malicious actors using AI. So saying "just unplug it" isn't really applicable, especially when it comes to governments.
With AGI the burden is on the proponents to prove beyond any doubt that AGI is completely safe. The burden is not on its detractors to prove that it will be bad for humanity. It’s only logical. If I am wrong and we abstain then we lose nothing. If you are wrong then we lose everything.
Unless they want to specifically explain out a danger, they add nothing that any kids who's seen The Terminator can do.
> Killer drones are a big concern. There is a moral question, and a security question
Other than your morality, which I don't care about, what specifically could happen? Be specific else it's pure FUD.
NK could have introduced Ebola to the USA for decades, but they don't. So they, along with the rest of the countries, aren't going to 'just' introduce 'killer' drones.