The “godfather” of AI says it poses no threat to humanity
No jobs are threatened either
In 2018, Yann LeCun along with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio won the Turing Award for their innovations in the field of AI and became known as the “Godfathers of AI”. LeCun now works as chief AI scientist at Meta and disagrees with his colleagues’ view that AI is a threat to humanity.
Will AI take over the world? No, this is a projection of human nature into machines.
He considers experts’ fears that AI threatens humanity to be ” absolutely ridiculous “. He agrees that computers will eventually become smarter than humans, but that is still many years away and ” if you realize it’s not safe, you just don’t build it .” He also believes it would be a huge mistake to limit AI research by government laws.
He also believes that those who worry that AI poses a threat to humanity simply cannot imagine how its development can be made safe.
It’s like asking someone in 1930 how you would make a turbo-jet engine safe. Turbo-jets weren’t invented yet in 1930. So is human-level AI which hasn’t been invented yet. Eventually, turbo-jets became extremely safe and reliable and so will AI.
Developments will be sequential. We may create an AI as powerful as a mouse brain. This will not take over the world and will also run in a data center which will have an OFF switch.
As for the threat to jobs, he said:
It won’t cause many people to lose their jobs permanently. It’s just that jobs will change because we have no idea what the jobs will be like 20 years from now. Smart computers will create a new Renaissance for humanity, just as the internet changed the printed press.
LeCun isn’t opposed to AI laws, but he doesn’t think they should be universal. For example, different laws are needed for AI systems in cars and different ones for medical devices.
