44 | New Scientist | 8 June 2019
‘A I s a r e r e a l ly d u mb.
They don’t even have the
intelligence of a 6-month-old’
Yoshua Bengio is one of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence.
Timothy Revell finds out why he doesn’t fear a machine apocalypse
O
VER the past decade, machine
intelligence has vastly improved.
That is in large part due to deep
learning, a technique that gives computers
the ability to teach themselves. It underpins
everything from world-beating chess and
Go algorithms to digital voice assistants like
Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri.
Yoshua Bengio is one of the pioneers of
deep learning, and has spent his career at
the forefront of AI research. He was recently
awarded the A. M. Turing Award, which is often
called the Nobel prize of computing, along
with two other deep learning pioneers:
Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto
and Google, and Yann LeCun, who is chief AI
scientist at Facebook. The trio will split the
$1 million prize.
Bengio remains in academia at the University
of Montreal, Canada, but co-founded an AI
incubator and advises on a couple of startups.
He resisted the draw of a juicy Silicon Valley
salary, because he believes “humans are more
important than money”. That being said, he
isn’t humanity’s biggest fan. For all his
optimism about the future of machines, he
wouldn’t put it past us to mess things up.How do you think AI will be able to actually
help people?
The progress we have made in machine
learning has been pretty amazing, and it
can empower almost any sector of society.
I have invested a lot of effort in healthcare
applications, especially the goal of machines
being able to diagnose cancer from medical
images. I also think there is a lot of potential
when it comes to climate change, such as using MI
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