Yoshua Bengio, founder and scientific director of Mila – Quebec AI Institute, is regarded as one of the three godfathers of AI, along with fellow Nobel Prize winners Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, having carried out research into the technology in the 80’s and 90’s. However, according to the BBC, the researcher feels “lost” over his life’s work, stating that “it is challenging, emotionally speaking,” as researchers are increasingly unsure how to “stop these systems or to prevent damage”.

Speaking with Information Age, Bengio said that a slowdown of development may be needed to ensure long-term safety, before going on to state: “We still have individual and collective agency in this process, and that the morally right thing to do is to continue working towards reducing catastrophic risks, just like climate activists continue fighting to steer us towards better outcomes while they could certainly feel discouraged and ‘too late’.”

Regarding managing the risks of AI, he commented: “We need to invest at least as much in understanding and mitigating all the risks as we are currently investing in making AI systems more competent”.