Meta Scientist Yann LeCun says AI won't Destroy Jobs forever

Meta Scientist Yann LeCun says AI won't destroy jobs forever    in the BBC

Prof Yann LeCun is known as one of the three godfathers of AI and works as Facebook-owner Meta's top AI scientist    By Chris Vallance, Technology reporter

One of the three "godfathers of AI" has said it won't take over the world or permanently destroy jobs.

Prof Yann LeCun said some experts' fears of AI posing a threat to humanity were "preposterously ridiculous".

Computers would become more intelligent than humans but that was many years away and "if you realise it's not safe you just don't built it," he said.

A UK government advisor recently told the BBC that some powerful artificial intelligence might need to be banned.

In 2018 Prof LeCun won the Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio for their breakthroughs in AI and all three became known as "the godfathers of AI".

Prof LeCun now works as the chief AI scientist at Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. He disagrees with his fellow godfathers that AI is a risk to the human race.

"Will AI take over the world? No, this is a projection of human nature on machines" he said. It would be a huge mistake to keep AI research "under lock and key", he added.

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People who worried that AI might pose a risk to humans did so because they couldn't imagine how it could be made safe, Prof LeCun argued.

"It's as if you asked in 1930 to 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," and the same would happen with AI he said. Meta has a large AI research programme and producing intelligent systems as capable as humans is one of its goals. As well as research, the company uses AI to help identify harmful social media posts.

Prof LeCun spoke at an event for invited press, about his own work in so-called Objective Driven AI which aims to produce safe systems that can remember, reason, plan and have common sense - features popular chatbots like ChatGPT lack.  ... '