Alan Turing awardee Yann LeCun says fears of AI threatening humanity are “preposterously ridiculous”
The debate around the regulation of artificial intelligence (AI) is at an all-time high as the European Union passed the AI Regulation bill on Wednesday. For months, many prominent people like Elon Musk and Sam Altman as well as two of the three Godfathers of AI, Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, have been protesting the unprecedented rise of AI and have called for government regulation in space raising concerns of a superintelligent AI causing the extinction of humanity. However, the third Godfather of AI, Yann LeCun, has shunned these fears and has called them “preposterously ridiculous”.
Professor LeCun also won the Alan Turing Award in 2018 along with Hinton and Bengio, and they are collectively regarded as the Godfathers of AI. However, LeCun has a different opinion on AI than his contemporaries. In an event for invited press, where he spoke about his own work in the field of AI, he also addressed the concerns around this emerging technology.
Answering a question, he said, “Will AI take over the world? No, this is a projection of human nature on machines,” reported BBC. He also added that keeping AI research “under lock and key” would be a huge mistake.
He also addressed the comments that AI could pose a risk to humanity and explained that these fears exist because people have not reached a stage where they can even clearly define these risks, which is a precursor before solving these problems.
He likened the situation with a hypothetical analogy and said, “It's as if you asked in 1930 someone how are you going to make a turbo-jet safe? Turbo-jets were not invented yet in 1930, same as human-level AI has not been invented yet. Turbo jets were eventually made incredibly reliable and safe”. He argued that similarly AI
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