Godfather Part II Yoshua Bengio, a famed computer scientist who’s considered one of the three “godfathers” of artificial intelligence, is starting to feel a little blue about his life’s work, as AI — or at least its breathless hype — seems poised to spiral out of control. In a new interview with the BBC, Bengio said that had he known how rapidly AI would develop, he would have prioritized safety over usefulness. “You could say I feel lost,” Bengio told the outlet. “But you have to keep going and you have to engage, discuss, encourage others to think with you.” The Canadian computer scientist’s comments come after he signed a disquieting open letter from industry leaders that warns of the “risk of extinction” that AI poses, along fellow AI godfather Geoffrey Hinton, who recently quit his job at Google after a similar personal reckoning. Bad Actors For now, one of Bengio’s foremost concerns is “bad actors” abusing AI, echoing Hinton’s sentiments from an earlier interview last month. “It might be military, it might be terrorists, it might be somebody very angry, psychotic,” Bengio told the BBC. “And so if it’s easy to program these AI systems to ask them to do something very bad, this could be very dangerous.” Bengio added that he believes governments need to keep tabs on companies developing AI in the same way they do “for any other sector like building airplanes or cars or pharmaceuticals.” On top of that, Bengio suggested the radical idea that the people…Man Who Helped Invent Modern AI Is Now Wracked With Regret