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from the train-an-anti-AI-to-counter-their-AI dept.
Deep Learning 'Godfather' Bengio Worries About China's Use of AI
Yoshua Bengio, a Canadian computer scientist who helped pioneer the techniques underpinning much of the current excitement around artificial intelligence, is worried about China's use of AI for surveillance and political control.
Bengio, who is also a co-founder of Montreal-based AI software company Element AI, said he was concerned about the technology he helped create being used for controlling people's behavior and influencing their minds.
"This is the 1984 Big Brother scenario," he said in an interview. "I think it's becoming more and more scary."
[...] 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's 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 over China's use-cases for AI. Billionaire George Soros recently 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.
Also at Futurism.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday February 04 2019, @11:23PM (2 children)
If there are still orders [soylentnews.org] of magnitude [darpa.mil] of computer performance improvements yet to be realized, things will get extra scary.
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(Score: 5, Informative) by fyngyrz on Tuesday February 05 2019, @12:49AM (1 child)
Speaking as a US citizen:
Anyone who isn't already extra-scared by the various downsides human intelligence has imposed upon us is not really paying attention.
Sure, things can get worse. And given that the public has allowed things to get as bad as they are now without putting a stop to it, I'm sure that's going to happen.
The signs have been fairly obvious for decades. Pretty much since the powers that be decided that SSNs were personal identifiers rather than account numbers. Ever tighter the grip; ever warmer the water. Happy little frogs.
--
I may be apathetic, but I don't care.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday February 05 2019, @01:18AM
A lot of people are currently assuming that Moore's law will completely run out of steam. We might see a doubling of CPU performance and a few hundred percent more GPU performance in this scenario, and then classical computing hits a brick wall. Optimizations will be made for at least a while, and purpose-built TPUs and ASICs could give machine/deep learning an additional push. Further algorithmic improvements could have a bigger impact than new hardware, leading to more capable AI. This is the scary scenario.
In the extra scary scenario, we could use a new type of transistor and 3D architectures to completely reinvigorate the performance race. Getting rid of most of the waste heat not only allows you to boost clock speeds and use less power (well, one follows the other), but it allows you to more easily stack layers of cores and memory. Computers could get hundreds, thousands, or even millions of times faster for certain tasks. Then you factor in various optimizations and algorithmic improvements. If you get a 1,000x increase, suddenly, training the AI takes a minute instead of 17 hours. Or you can accomplish good results on much more complicated tasks that are a reach for today's algorithms.
Is the first world 95% as scary as the second world, or more like 25% or 5%? We can only guess. But if we get those performance increases (and there are more candidate technologies than the two I've been linking lately), they are going to be a double-edged sword.
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