AI pioneer Yann LeCun says that fears of the existential peril of AI are “complete B.S.” and that, in so many words, we’d be fools not to pursue its development.
The Wall Street Journal story is hidden behind a paywall but the headline says it all: “This AI Pioneer Thinks AI Is Dumber Than a Cat.”
We cat owners are not comforted by his assessment., since we know that “dumb” felines are capable of great mischief, evidence mood shifts that would put any human being under lock and key, and can be downright cruel and deadly to other living things (especially those smaller than them).
They’re proof that doing harm requires no superior intellect. If AIs are like cats, every chatbot and smart system or device should be shut down immediately. The risks are too immense to ignore.
But I digress.
LeCun’s point is that we shouldn’t feel threatened by AI, a position that hasn’t changed since this story ran on the BBC website over a year ago.
Only then he said AI would only get as smart as a rat.
What a difference a year makes.
His POV is still a nice aggregation of all the Pollyanna crap that we get from the investors and developers who hope to make billions from selling AI, or from the academics they fund to legitimize their mad intentions.
[NOTE: LeCun is Chief Data Scientist at Meta, which is one of the big tech companies vying to get more powerful AI to the marketplace faster].
Worried that AI will destroy the world? Tsk-tsk, according to the BBC story, it’ll never come up with a reason to do it and we’ll always be able to turn it off.
Scared that AI will get smarter than us? That’s the point, you dolt, and we’ll use it to solve all our problems. Fearful that it’ll take everyone’s jobs? Naw, it’ll inaugurate a new era of job creation that we can’t even imagine.
We have nothing to fear other than the unknown and, as with the development of any other technology, we’ll devise ways to manage it safely once we know what AI can do.
He pooh-poohs AI at our own risk. None of what he says is true, or the whole truth.
He rightly says that we can’t predict what AI will do, but that means we may be surprised by those capabilities and might not have the time or ability to contain them. Presuming that we’ll always possess an off switch is a canard, since it assumes that we’ll know when it’s time to turn something off, or that the problem(s) we hope to avert are the product of a particular device or system.
It also presumes that someone other than a techno-optimist like LeCun won’t be the one with his or her hand on the switch.
The promise that AI will somehow solve all our “big” problems assumes that our problems are technical or even solvable, but they’re not. Whether global or personal, we lack the political, economic, and individual willpower to make the lifestyle changes that we already know are necessary to combat global warming or the incidences of cancer.
Relying on technologies to solve our problems means relying on technologists to define them in the first place, which is a dicey proposition. Remember that social media was supposed to “fix” our problems collaborating and speaking in the public square, and it instead gave us lives spent in suspicious and angry isolation.
The supercomputers in Colossus: The Forbin Project decide to “fix” the problem of the Cold War by taking away control of government from humans.
And it’s silly to suggest that new jobs will magically appear for the people who lose their jobs to AI, since we already know LeCun believes it’s impossible to predict what AI can and won’t do. What if no jobs appear, or it takes generations for them to do so, which is what happened to knitting jobs displaced by looms during the Industrial Revolution? What happens to those ex-workers in the meantime?
What if the jobs that we can’t imagine now turn out to stink compared to the old ones, or simply pay less? Again, this is what happened to many workers during the Industrial Revolution, especially women.
What if those unemployed workers are unqualified for those new jobs, or don’t live anywhere near them? Are we to assume to the governments and individuals that have proven incapable and/or unwilling to do things about our problems today will somehow grow the backbones to do things about them in the future?
And, finally, AI isn’t just another technology tool, it gets smarter and more aware over time, depending on the propensities and wherewithal of its developers and the data available in the environments of its applications.
Good luck as a human worker hoping to stay ahead of AIs’ capabilities. The jobs upheaval will be a never-ending race which people will only win temporarily, if ever.
Saying otherwise isn’t just a hopeful misstatement, it’s a lie.
But it’s what the AI toffs are telling us so that they can pursue their innovation and profit-making fantasies without the encumbrance of legal or moral guidelines.
They pooh-pooh AI at our own risk.
[This essay appeared originally at Spiritual Telegraph]