One of the “godfathers” of artificial intelligence is calling on the City of Toronto to sign a declaration for the responsible use of AI amidst concerns over data privacy, police surveillance and Sidewalk Labs’ waterfront smart neighbourhood.With the ability of sensors to harvest massive amounts of data, and the increasing power of artificial intelligence to derive insights and predictions from that data, city services like public transportation, waste collection and snow removal can all be optimized, says Yoshua Bengio, a computer scientist at the Université de Montréal.“This would be great. The concern is that measuring all that data has to be done in a way that is consistent with issues of privacy, control and democracy. That’s why we want to put in these principles, and make sure that civil servants understand them and don’t deploy things that go against these principles.”Bengio was one of the computer scientists whose research on a type of machine learning called neural networks led to unprecedented breakthroughs in the ability of computers to carry out tasks like image and speech recognition. Those advances underpin modern AI, from virtual assistants that recognize verbal commands to social networks that automatically label faces. Last month, Bengio shared the 2018 Turing Award, sometimes called the Nobel Prize of computer science, with two other neural net pioneers, Geoffrey Hinton of Google, the Vector Institute and the University of Toronto, and Yann LeCun of Facebook and New York University. Last December Bengio helped organize the Montréal Declaration, an ethical framework for the development and deployment of artificial intelligence. The declaration identifies a set of values and priorities to guide AI, from the protection of privacy and democracy to the maintenance of social and cultural diversity. The City of Montreal is one of 41 organizational signatories; 1,178 individuals have also added ...
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