Intelligence without moral sense is the worst case

Yoshua BengioAI Safety Breakfast with Yoshua Bengio | October 2024at 36:40

From the conversation

After that, chances are it won't come on its own, these capabilities, but people get lost in definition of what is human-level general-purpose AI, AGI, when who cares what definition we're going to take. The only thing is: "Has the AI reached a certain level of competence that can become dangerous?" And it doesn't have to be about everything. It can even be superhuman in one area and stupid in others. In fact, that's the worst case. An AI that lacks the moral sense of what we consider virtuous in human beings, but is otherwise highly intelligent, is the horror.

Machine-generated transcript. The excerpt can include the interviewer and other voices, and the transcription may contain errors.

Summary

The most dangerous scenario is not a superintelligent AI — it is an AI that is superhuman in specific areas like persuasion or cybersecurity, but lacks moral sense. That combination, not general superintelligence, is the real horror.

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Concept

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