Yoshua Bengio, a Canadian computer scientist who helped pioneer the techniques underpinning much of the current excitement around artificial intelligence (AI), said he is worried about China’s use of AI for surveillance and political control.
Bengio, who is also a cofounder of Montreal-based software company Element AI, said he was concerned about the technology he helped create being used to control people’s behavior and influence their minds.
“This is the 1984 Big Brother scenario,” he said in an interview. “I think it’s becoming more and more scary.”
Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal, is considered one of the three “godfathers” of deep learning, along with Yann LeCun and Geoff Hinton.
It is a technology that uses neural networks — a kind of software loosely based on the human brain — to make predictions based on data. It is responsible for recent advances in facial recognition, natural language processing, translation and recommendation algorithms.
Deep learning requires a large amount of data to provide examples from which to learn, but China, with its vast population and system of state record-keeping, has a lot of that.
The Chinese government has begun using closed-circuit video cameras and facial recognition to monitor what its citizens do in public, from jaywalking to engaging in political dissent. It has also created a National Credit Information Sharing Platform, which is being used to blacklist rail and air passengers for “anti-social” behavior and is considering expanding uses of this system to other situations.
“The use of your face to track you should be highly regulated,” Bengio said.
Bengio is not alone in his concern about China’s use-cases for AI. Billionaire George Soros used a speech at the World Economic Forum on Jan. 24 to highlight the risks the country’s use of AI poses to civil liberties and minority rights.
Unlike some peers, Bengio, who heads the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, has resisted the temptation to work for a large, advertising-driven technology company.
Responsible development of AI might require some large technology companies to change the way they operate, he said.
The amount of data large tech companies control is also a concern.
The creation of data trusts — non-profit entities or legal frameworks under which people own their data and allow them to be used only for certain purposes — might be one solution, Bengio said.
If a trust held enough data, it could negotiate better terms with big tech companies that needed them, he said on Thursday during a talk at Amnesty International UK’s office in London.
There were many ways deep-learning software could be used for good, Bengio said.
In Thursday’s talk, he unveiled a project he is working on that uses AI to create augmented-reality images depicting what people’s individual homes or neighborhoods might look like as the result of natural disasters spawned by climate change.
However, he said there was also a risk that the implementation of AI would cause job losses on a scale, and at a speed, that is different from what has happened with other technological innovations.
Governments need to be proactive in thinking about these risks, including considering new ways to redistribute wealth within society, he said.
“Technology, as it gets more powerful, outside of other influences, just leads to more concentration of power and wealth,” Bengio said. “That is bad for democracy, that is bad for social justice and the general well-being of most people.”
Apple Inc increased iPhone production in India by about 53 percent last year and now makes a quarter of its marquee devices there, reflecting the US company’s efforts to avoid tariffs on China. The company assembled about 55 million iPhones in India last year, up from 36 million a year earlier, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named because the numbers aren’t public. Apple makes about 220 million to 230 million iPhones a year globally, with India’s share of the total increasing rapidly. Apple has accelerated its expansion in the world’s most populous country in recent years, bolstered
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) share of the global foundry market rose to almost 70 percent last year amid booming demand for artificial intelligence (AI), market information advisory firm TrendForce Corp (集邦科技) said on Thursday. The contract chipmaker posted US$122.54 billion in revenue, up 36.1 percent from a year earlier, accounting for 69.9 percent of the global market, TrendForce said. Its share was up from 64.4 percent in 2024, it said. TSMC’s closest rival, Samsung Electronics, was a distant second, posting US$12.63 billion in sales, down 3.9 percent from a year earlier, for a 7.2 percent share of the global market. In the
HEADWINDS: The company said it expects its computer business, as well as consumer electronics and communications segments to see revenue declines due to seasonality Pegatron Corp (和碩) yesterday said it aims to grow its artificial intelligence (AI) server revenue more than 10-fold this year from last year, driven by orders from neocloud solutions clients and large cloud service providers. The electronics manufacturing service provider said AI server revenue growth would be driven primarily by the Nvidia Corp GB300 server platform. Server shipments are expected to increase each quarter this year, with the second half likely to outperform the first half, it said. The AI server market is expected to broaden this year as more inference applications emerge, which would drive demand for system-on-chip, application-specific integrated circuits
DAMAGE REPORT: Global central banks are assessing war-driven inflation risks as the law of unintended consequences careens around the world, spiking oil prices Central banks from Washington to London and from Jakarta to Taipei are about to make their first assessments of economic damage after more than two weeks of conflict between the US and Iran. Decisions this week encompassing every member of the G7 and eight of the world’s 10 most-traded currency jurisdictions are likely to confirm to investors that the specter of a new inflation shock is already worrying enough to prompt heightened caution. The US Federal Reserve is widely expected to do exactly what everyone anticipated weeks ahead of its March 17-18 policy gathering: hold rates steady. The narrative surrounding that
RSS