One of the three “godfathers of AI” has claimed that the technology won’t take over the globe or eliminate jobs for good.
Professor Yann LeCun called the concerns of some academics that AI will endanger humanity “preposterously ridiculous.”
It would take many years until computers surpassed human intelligence, and until then, if you realize it’s not safe you just don’t build it, he stated.
A UK government official recently told the news organization that it might be necessary to outlaw some extremely potent artificial intelligence.
Together with Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, Prof. LeCun received the Turing Award in 2018 for their contributions to AI, earning the title of “the godfathers of AI.”
At Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, Prof. LeCun is currently the organization’s top artificial intelligence scientist. He rejects the view of his fellow godfathers that artificial intelligence poses a threat to humanity.
Will AI eventually rule the world? He asserted that this is instead a reflection of human nature on machines. He continued, it would be a grave error to keep AI research “under lock and key”.
Prof. LeCun suggested that people who expressed concern that AI would be dangerous to people did so because they were unable to envision how it could be made secure.
It would be like asking someone in 1930, “How are you going to make a turbo-jet safe?” In the same way that turbo-jets had not yet been developed in 1930, human-level AI has not yet.
The same thing would happen with AI, he said, just as turbojets were eventually made to be highly dependable and safe.
Producing intelligent machines with human-level capabilities is one of the objectives of Meta’s extensive AI research effort. The business use AI in addition to research to identify potentially harmful social media posts.
Prof. LeCun discussed his own work in so-called Objective Driven AI, which attempts to create secure systems that can recall, reason, plan, and have common sense—features that well-known chatbots like ChatGPT lack.
Artificial general intelligence, sometimes known as AGI, is what people are talking about when they express concerns about future machines that could be intelligent on a human level or above. These are systems that, like people, are capable of resolving a variety of issues.
According to him, there was concern that if AGI existed, scientists would be able to turn on a super-intelligent system that would quickly rule the entire planet and that is just utterly absurd.
In response to a query, Prof. LeCun stated that there would be gradual advancements and possibly you would see an AI with the same power as a rat’s brain. He said, it’s still going to run on a data centre somewhere with an off switch, despite the fact that it wasn’t going to take over the world. And if you understand it’s not safe, you just don’t build it, he continued.
Impact on jobs
Some businesses have stopped hiring for specific occupations as a result of claims that AI has the potential to replace many employment.
According to Prof. LeCun, this won’t permanently put a lot of people out of employment. However, the nature of work would alter because we “have no idea” what the most in-demand jobs will be in 20 years.
According to him, intelligent computers will usher in a new renaissance for humanity similar to how the internet or the printing press did.
Tuesday’s speech by Prof. LeCun came before a vote on the AI Act for Europe, which is intended to regulate artificial intelligence.
They don’t like it at all, they think it’s too broad, maybe too restrictive, he claimed, quoting his meetings with AI start-ups in Europe. However, he claimed that he was not an expert on the law.
Prof. LeCun declared that while he was not opposed to regulation, he believed that each application would require its own set of guidelines. For instance, he thought that there should be different guidelines for AI systems used in cars and those that scan medical images.
