Sigal Samuel

Researchers have been warning for years about the risks of AI systems, especially systems with their own goals and general intelligence. Can you explain what’s making the situation increasingly scary to you now?

Yoshua Bengio

In the last six months, we’ve gotten evidence of AIs that are so misaligned that they would go against our moral instructions. They would plan and do these bad things — lying, cheating, trying to persuade us with deceptions, and — worst of all — trying to escape our control and not wanting to be shut down, and doing anything [to avoid shutdown], including blackmail. These are not an immediate danger because they’re all controlled experiments...but we don’t know how to really deal with this.