YoshuaBengio—the head of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, and widely regarded as the pioneer and forerunner of Canadian Artificial Intelligence, has aired his views on the need for AI industries to create a socially responsible commission.

He warns that the unethical and vile uses of AI technology possess realistic treats to the public image of the developing region where the research is being carried out.

Bengio remarked that the government and the sectors involved should effectively tackle the concerns surrounding unscrupulous AI activities such as, the building of “killer robots”, privacy infringement , and the development of facial recognition that can be used by tyrannical regimes to repress their citizens.

Another AI expert and director of Facebook’s AI research, Yann LeCun ,adds that a partnership needs to be created amongst large tech companies involved in AI research to tackle prominent issues such as “the potential use of the technology to manipulate democracy and develop guidelines on the appropriate ways to construct, train, test and deploy discoveries.”

During a ReWork Deep Learning Summit panel discussion in Montreal last week, LeCun said “One danger is that the image of artificial intelligence in the public will degrade because of bad uses of AI.”

One of the numerous fears of Bengio is the infusion of AI into military projects, with the aim of creating lethal independent weapons.

He called on the world governments to sign treaties that places bans on such research that intends to create weapons that are lethal without human intervention.

“I’m hoping that Canada will be among the countries that will push that forward,” Bengio said in an interview.

He acknowledged that some AI researchers and countries have blatantly refused to carry out such destructive military projects, and that there might be a huge risk of job losses due to artificial intelligence.

“I believe that governments should start thinking right now about how to adapt to this in the next decade, how to change our social safety net to deal with that,” he added.

November 2 and 3 has been fixed in Montreal for a forum on the socially responsible development of artificial intelligence, with hundreds of AI experts expected to be in attendance.

“The sense is that there are important social, political and ethical questions raised by recent developments in AI and so it’s putting together people to discuss these issues,” said Christine Tappolet, a Université de Montréal philosophy professor and director of the Centre for Ethics Research.

“[AI] is going to change the game completely so what you can do now and what probably will be possible in two, five years is massive,” she said.

Tappolet remarked that Montreal was chosen as the host city for the event due to its formidable status as one of the foremost places for AI research, and its long held tradition of being interested in the social implications of technological developments.