Geoffrey Hinton vs Yann LeCun: The Battle Over Regulation Of AI | Part 3

Two reasons. The first thing is science and technology progress through the quick exchange of information and scientific information. And one problem that we have to solve with AI is not a technological problem of what product do we have to build. That's of course a problem. But the main problem we have to solve is how do we make machines more intelligent? That's a scientific question and we don't have a monopoly on good ideas. A lot of good ideas come from academia. They come from other research labs, public or private. And so if there is a fast exchange of information, the field progresses faster. And if you become secretive, you fall behind because people don't want to talk to you anymore.

If you look what the big companies are doing right now, they're lobbying to get less AI regulation. There's hardly any regulation as it is, but they want less because they want short-term profits. So that's the future. Now, if you imagine this kind of future where all of our information diet is mediated by those AI systems, you do not want those things to be controlled by a small number of companies on the west coast of the US. It has to be an open platform, kind of like the internet. The internet is all the software infrastructure of the internet is completely open source. And it's not by design. It's just that it's the most efficient way to have a platform that is safe, customizable, etc. And for assistants, you want those systems will constitute the repository of all human knowledge and culture. You can't have that centralized. Everybody has to contribute to it. So it needs to be open.

People don't yet know how to do effective regulation and effective safeguards. There's lots of research now showing these things can get round safeguards. There's recent research showing that if you give them a goal and you say you really need to achieve this goal, they will pretend to do things during training. During training they'll pretend not to be as smart as they are so that you will allow them to be that smart. So it's scary already. We don't know how to regulate them. Obviously we need to, I think the best we can do at present is say we ought to put a lot of resources into investigating how we can keep them safe. So what I advocate is that the government forces the big companies to put lots more resources into safety research.

In my opinion, the criterion, the reason really that I'm really very much in favor of open platforms is the fact that AI systems are going to constitute a very basic infrastructure in the future and there has to be some way of ensuring that culturally and in terms of knowledge those things are diverse, a bit like Wikipedia. You can't have just a Wikipedia in one language that has to cover all languages, cultures and everything.

It would be great if governments could say, 'Look, these fake videos are so good at manipulating the electorate that we need them all marked as fake, otherwise we're going to lose democracy.' The problem is that some politicians would like to lose democracy. So that's going to make it hard.

Yeah. And that clearly is somewhat out of the bottle. It's fairly clear that organizations like Cambridge Analytica by pumping out fake news had an effect on Brexit and it's fairly clear that Facebook was manipulated to have an effect on the 2016 election. So the genie is out of the bottle in that sense. We can try and at least contain it a bit, but that's not the main thing I'm talking about. The main thing I'm talking about is the risk of these things becoming super intelligent and taking over control from us.

So the apparent omniscience that politicians like to show that they have is completely fake here. There is nobody, nobody understands what's going on really. There's two issues. Do you understand how it's working and do you understand how to make it safe? We understand quite a bit about how it's working but not nearly enough. So it can still do lots of things that surprise us and we don't understand how to make it safe.