Superintelligence: Should we stop a race if we don’t actually know where the finish line is?

By Anthony Hié, Chief Innovation & Digital Officer, member of the Executive Committee, Excelia (France)

Geoffrey Hinton, pioneer of deep learning and former researcher at Google; Yoshua Bengio, Director of the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute (Mila) and co-winner of the Turing Award; Stuart Russell, Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, and specialist in intelligent systems security… These three industry savants are among the main signatories of an international petition(1) supported by more than 700 experts and prominent figures calling for a pause in the development of so-called ‘super-intelligent’ artificial intelligence.

Entrepreneurs, philosophers and public figures have joined forces with them to warn of a potential danger, namely, a race for algorithmic power that is being run without any real governance or understanding of its consequences.

A call to slow things down to avoid reaching the point of no return
The signatories call ...