Hopeful Views on Artificial Intelligence
The following are comments by Yann LeCun (Chief AI Scientist for Facebook AI Research, Professor at New York University focusing on Data Science and Mathematical Sciences) from an interview with Lex Fridman.
“We can make humanity smarter with AI. AI basically will amplify human intelligence. It’s as if every one of us will have a staff of smart AI assistants …They’ll do our bidding, perhaps execute a task in ways that are much better than we could do ourselves, because they’d be smarter than us. And so it’s like everyone would be the boss of a staff of super smart virtual people.
“All the mistakes that humanity makes is because of lack of intelligence really, or lack of knowledge, which is related. So making people smarter, we just can only be better. For the same reason that public education is a good thing and books are a good thing, and the internet is also a good thing, intrinsically and even social networks are a good thing if you run them properly.
“AI is going to make humanity smarter. And the analogy I’ve been using is the fact that perhaps an equivalent event in the history of humanity to what might be provided by generalization of AI assistant is the invention of the printing press. It made everybody smarter, the fact that people could have access to books. Books were a lot cheaper than they were before, and so a lot more people had an incentive to learn to read, which wasn’t the case before … And people became smarter. It enabled the enlightenment.
“There wouldn’t be an enlightenment without the printing press. It enabled philosophy, rationalism, escape from religious doctrine, democracy, science … it also created 200 years of essentially religious conflicts … so it had some bad effects and some good effects ... I don’t think anyone today would say that the invention of the printing press had a overall negative effect ...
“It’s a real question of what is going to be the effect of a technological transformation like AI on the job market and the labor market? … [economists] tell us we’re not going to run out of the job. This is not going to cause mass unemployment. This is just going to be gradual shift of different professions.
“The professions that are going to be hot 10 or 15 years from now, we have no idea today what they’re going to be. The same way, if you go back 20 years in the past, who could have thought 20 years ago that the hottest job, even five, 10 years ago, was mobile app developer? Smartphones weren’t invented"
OUR TAKE
As presented above, AI represents a fundamental shift in information technology that will reshape society in many ways.
ChatGPT have attracted significant media attention, but other AI projects (some at a much smaller scale) are exploring AI's capabilities as well - which should also drive innovation.
AI's high hardware and power costs are a concern, which suggests this may be the "mainframe" era of AI, and nimble start-ups can significantly change the AI landscape.