Ever since the launch of OpenAI’s sensational chatbot ChatGPT, the clamour around AI taking away human jobs has risen dramatically. Millions of people have expressed their unfounded apprehensions about potential job loss.
The rapid developments in AI technologies have also fuelled these concerns. However, the world can maybe heave a sigh of relief.
Meta’s top scientist Professor Yann LeCun, known as one of the three godfathers of AI, has affirmed by saying that artificial intelligence will not be taking over the world, nor will it be permanently destroying jobs.
In a press interaction for Meta in Paris, LeCun termed the fears of AI posing a threat to humanity as ‘preposterously ridiculous’. He said that computers would become more intelligent than humans, however, that will take years. His solution to all the apprehension is that if anyone felt that AI was not safe they should simply not build it.
His comments are contrary to the “other godfathers” Geoffey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, who called AI a threat to the human race. LeCun said that the whole idea of AI taking over the world was a projection of human nature on machines.
“It would be a huge mistake to keep AI research under lock and key,” he was quoted as saying by the BBC.
According to the scientist, those who were worried about the risks of AI did so because they couldn’t imagine how the technology could be made safer. He drew parallels between the invention of Turbojets to demonstrate his argument. The professor said that if we asked someone in 1930 how they were going to make turbojets safe it would be pointless as turbojets were invented in 1930.
LeCun said that there was no question that AI would overtake human intelligence. However, he added that researchers were missing some crucial concepts to arrive at that stage.
LeCun is a Turing Award-winning French computer scientist who has expertise in machine learning, computational neuroscience, computer vision, and mobile robotics. LeCun is currently Vice President, Chief AI scientist at Meta.
In May this year, another AI godfather George Hinton announced his resignation from Google, saying how much he regretted his work. Hinton went on to warn about the looming dangers of the rapid developments in AI. The same month, Yoshua Bengio said that he would have placed safety above utility had he realised the pace at which AI would evolve.
