Professor Yann LeCun, one of the three award-winning pioneers of artificial intelligence (AI), believes that fears that the technology could take over the world and destroy jobs and replace humans are “ridiculous”. ” are, say “It wouldn’t have been built. If it wasn’t safe.”
Professor Yann LeCun said: “Computers will become more intelligent than humans but that was years away and if you realized it wasn’t safe, you didn’t build it.”
Recently, a UK government official said that some AI may need to be banned.
Professor LeCun won the Turing Award for his achievements in AI along with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Benjio, and the three were named the “Godfathers of AI” in 2018.
“Will AI take over the world? No, it’s a projection of human nature on machines,” said LeCun, who serves as chief AI scientist at Meta.
“It would be a huge mistake to keep AI research under lock and key,” he argued, adding that “people who worried that AI might pose a threat to humans did so because they thought Couldn’t even figure out how to make it safe.”
“It’s like if you asked someone in 1930 how you’re going to make a turbojet safe. Turbojets hadn’t been invented in 1930, just like human-level AI hadn’t been invented yet. “
“Ultimately turbojets were made incredibly reliable and safe, and the same will happen with AI,” he said.
He said: “There was no question that AI would surpass human intelligence. But researchers still lacked the concepts necessary to reach that level, which would take years, if not decades, to reach.
When people express their concerns about technology that could overtake humans, they are referring to artificial general intelligence (AGI) – human-like systems capable of solving a wide range of problems.
“There was a fear that when AGI existed, scientists would turn on a super-intelligent system that would take over the world in minutes. That’s just ridiculous, you know,” he remarked.
Professor Yann LeCun also told JEE News that there will be progressive developments – perhaps you’ll get an AI as powerful as a rat’s brain. It wasn’t taking over the world, it was still running in a data center somewhere with a switch turned off.”
“And if you realize it’s not safe, you didn’t make it.”
AI effects on jobs
LeCun said: “It’s not going to put a lot of people out of work permanently”. But work will change because we “have no idea” what the most prominent jobs will be 20 years from now.”
“Intelligent computers will create a new renaissance for humanity in the same way that the Internet or the printing press did,” he noted.
LeCun was speaking ahead of Europe’s vote on the AI Act on Tuesday.
“They don’t like it at all, they think it’s too broad, maybe too restrictive,” he said from his conversations with AI startups in Europe. But he said he was not an expert on legislation.
He said he’s not against regulation — but he thinks each application will need its own rules, for example, different rules governing AI systems scanning medical images.
