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.”
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts