In the tech world few topics are hotter than Artificial Intelligence (AI). Is it our friend? Or is it our foe?
The debate over its merits, limits and mooted dangers has seen intellectual and technological heavyweights clash, amongst them X’s (formerly Twitter) supremo Elon Musk and Meta’s Chief AI Scientist, Yann LeCun.
Last year Musk told the conservative political commentator Tucker Carlson that “AI is more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production, in the sense that it is, it has the potential — however small one may regard that probability, but it is non-trivial — it has the potential of civilisation destruction.”
LeCun, whose career in machine learning and AI spans the best part of four decades, has little time for such dystopian theories, arguing that “people are exploiting the fear about the technology” and proponents of such ideas from within the tech sphere are “naïve” or “attention seeking.”
In an interview with Wired’s Stephen Levy he stated that: “They don’t realize that AI actually mitigates dangers like hate speech, misinformation, propagandist attempts to corrupt the electoral system.” In 2022 he claimed AI pre-emptively removed 95% of hate speech posted on Facebook – before it could be seen.
Talking to venture capitalist Henry Stebbing – as reported by Business Today – he brusquely dismissed Musk’s prophecy of doom, reasoning that it’s based on a false premise, this being that when you “turn on a super-intelligent AI system, it’s going to refine itself to be even more intelligent than humans and the world will be destroyed.
“That’s completely ridiculous because there is no process in the real world that is exponential for very long. Those systems will have to recruit all the resources in the world. They would have to be given limitless power, agency.”
Read more by downloading the full article here.
