Hi Benjamin here with a podcast Extra, which features an interview with Joshua Benjio,

considered by many to be one of the godfathers of AI.

Joshua works at the University of Montreal in Canada and has been at the forefront of AI research

for many years. But recently, his opinions on the technology

have shifted, and he spends much of his time talking about his views on the potential dangers to

humanity that AI could represent. Joshua happened to be in London last week, and I went to meet him

along with my colleague

Davidey Castilevecchi. Davide spoke to Joshua about ways to identify and address the risks

posed by AI and his efforts to develop an AI with safety built in from the start.

Joshua chairs an international panel of advisors in the field of artificial intelligence,

which this year published the International AI Safety Report, which identified three main areas of

risk for the technology, unintended risk from malfunctions, malicious use and systemic risk, such as the loss of livelihoods.

Davidei asked Joshua which of these areas is the most likely to have a short-term impact

and which keeps him awake at night.

The second one, in other words, malicious use, is already happening, but I think we're only seeing

just the shades of it with things like deep fakes, cyber attacks that are very likely to be

driven by the most recent cyber capabilities of AI. And we need to have much better guardrails to mitigate those risks,

and those guardrails have to be both technical and political.

What keeps me even more awake, of course, is the possibility of human extinction.

That's the extreme malfunction.

That's why I suddenly pivoted my research into the question,

how do we build AI that will not harm humans by design? More broadly, I think it's a mistake

...