Yoshua Bengio is a Canadian computer scientist, and a pioneer of artificial neural networks and deep learning. Bengio received the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award, often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing”, with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun for their foundational work on deep learning.
He is the most cited computer scientist worldwide, and the most-cited living scientist across all fields (by total citations).
Takeaway – “As with other world changing technologies, we can shape the outcome, I’m confident we can create AI that demonstrably remains under our control, and supports human joy and endeavor..It’s an urgent mission for humanity.
We must work together on technical solutions that make AI safe by design, guaranteed by International agreements.”
One of the few institutions to survive the past decade’s erosion of international security agreements is the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) – the agreement banning nuclear test explosions in all environments.
What can the test-ban regime teach us about building a new European security architecture for the time when, eventually, the guns fall silent in Ukraine?
The CTBT was adopted by the UN General Assembly in September 1996 – exactly 30 years ago today. But the groundwork for a comprehensive ban had begun decades earlier. It began with the 1958 Geneva Conference of Experts to Study the Possibility of Detecting Violations of a Possible Agreement on the Suspension of Nuclear Tests, which led states to invest heavily in the development of a technical support system for a total ban.
The investment paid off. By the time decision-makers in Moscow, Paris, and Washington were finally ready to agree to a comprehensive ban on nuclear testing, much of the technical basis for a verification system was already in place. Diplomats could strike while the iron was hot.
The treaty’s basic logic is simple. Nuclear testing fuels arms competition and carries serious humanitarian and environmental costs. Nuclear explosions are therefore prohibited. To enforce that prohibition a global monitoring system continuously searches for possible violations. A worldwide network of stations sends data to an international data centre in Vienna, where it is analysed before both raw data and analytical products are made available to member states.
The comprehensive test-ban regime helped defuse one of the Cold War’s most contentious security disputes. For decades, nuclear testing had generated major diplomatic crises, public protests, and political confrontation. Today, nuclear test explosions are exceedingly rare and carry a heavy international stigma.
Crucially, the system does not depend on states trusting one another.
When a suspicious event occurs, governments do not have to rely solely on secret intelligence or on the claims of a single state. They have access to a shared body of measurements that can be analysed and independently scrutinised. Broad access to evidence narrows the space for disinformation, misunderstanding, and the kind of worst-case thinking that helped drive the Cold War arms race.