Geoffrey Hinton vs Yann LeCun: The Battle Over Regulation Of AI | Part 2

Autonomous weapons already exist, but not in the form that they will in the future. We're talking about missiles that are self-guided, but that's a lot different than a soldier that's sent into battle. The first example of autonomous weapon is landmines. And some countries, not the US, but some countries banned its use, international agreements about this that neither the US nor Russia nor China signed to ban them. And the reason for banning them is not because they're smart. It's because they're stupid. They're autonomous and stupid. And so they'll kill anybody, right? A guided missile, the more guided a missile is, the less collateral damage it makes. So then there is a moral debate. Is it better to actually have smarter weapons that only destroy what you need and doesn't kill hundreds of civilians next to it? Can that technology be used to protect democracy like in Ukraine? Ukraine makes massive use of drones and they're starting to put AI into it. Is it good or is it bad? I think it's necessary regardless of whether you think it's good or bad. Autonomous weapons are necessary for the protection of democracy in that case, right? Obviously, the concern is what if it's Hitler who has them rather than Roosevelt. Well, then it's the history of the world. Who has better technology? Is it the good guys or the bad guys? So the good guys should be doing everything they can. It's a complicated moral issue. It's not my specialty. I don't work on weapons.

I'm not a pacifist like some of my colleagues and I think you have to be realistic about the fact that this technology is being deployed in defense and for good things. The Ukrainian conflict has made it quite obvious that progress in technology can actually help protect democracy. One of Yan's other arguments is that the good guys will always have more resources than the bad guys. So AI can always be used to control misuses of AI by the bad guys. And Yan and I haven't resolved this argument because I asked him if Mark Zuckerberg was a good guy and he said yes.

No.

Partly because of how he's cozying up to Trump, partly because of the things that have gone on at Meta.

Yes, they care about short-term profits. Some of them say they care about the future of humanity, but when it comes to a choice between short-term profits and the future of humanity, they're much more interested in short-term profits. And Trump clearly doesn't care at all about the future of humanity. He just cares about staying out of jail.

I don't think it's a worry that people should have at the moment. How long has humanity existed? About 300,000 years. It's very short. So if you project 300,000 years in the future, what will humans then look like given the progress of technology? We can figure it out. Probably the biggest changes will not be through AI, it'll probably be through genetic engineering or something like that, which currently is banned probably for reasons that we don't know the potential dangers of.

I think we're entering a time of huge uncertainty. I think one would be foolish to be either optimistic or pessimistic. We just don't know what's going to happen. The best we can do is say let's put a lot of effort into trying to ensure that whatever happens is as good as it could have been. It's possible that there's no way we will control these super intelligences and that humanity is just a passing phase in the evolution of intelligence. That in a few hundred years time there won't be any people. It'll all be digital intelligences. That's possible. We just don't know. Predicting the future is a bit like looking into fog. You can see about 100 yards very clearly and then 200 yards you can't see anything. There's a kind of wall and I think that wall's at about 5 years.

We don't hand over control. We hand over the execution. We set the goals as I said before and they execute the goals. It's very much like being a leader of a team of people. You set the goal.

I do actually. I think there's some places where governments have to be involved like regulations that force you to show whether something was AI generated. But in terms of keeping control of a super intelligence, what you need is the people who are developing it to be doing lots of little experiments with it and seeing what happens as they're developing it and before it's out of control. And that's going to be mainly the researchers in companies. I don't think you can leave it to philosophers to speculate about what might happen. Anybody who's ever written a computer program knows that getting a little bit of empirical feedback by playing with things quickly disabuses you of your idea that you really understood what was going on. So people in the companies developing it are going to understand how to keep control of it if that's possible. So I agree with people like Sam Altman at OpenAI that this stuff is inevitably going to be developed because there's so many good uses of it and what we need is as it's being developed we put a lot of resources into trying to understand how to keep control of it and avoid some of the bad side effects.

There are certainly potential dangers in the medium term that are essentially due to potential misuse of the technology. And the more available you make the technology, the more people you make it accessible to. So you have a higher chance of people with bad intentions being able to use it. So the question is what countermeasures do you use for that? Some people are worried about things like a massive flood of misinformation generated by AI. What measures can you take against that? What we're working on is things like watermarking so that you know when a piece of data has been generated by a system. Another thing that we're extremely familiar with at Meta is detecting false accounts, divisive speech that is sometimes generated, sometimes just typed by people with bad intentions, hate speech, dangerous misinformation. We already have systems in place to protect against this on social networks. And the thing that people should understand is that those systems make massive use of AI. Hate speech takedown and detection in all languages in the world was not possible five years ago because the technology was just not there and now it's much better because of the progress in AI. Same for cybersecurity. You can use AI systems to try to attack a computer system, but that means you can also use it to protect. So every attack has a countermeasure and they both make use of AI. So it's a cat and mouse game as it's always been. And then there is the long-term danger of existential risk and I just do not believe in this at all because we have agency. It's not a natural phenomenon that we can stop. This is something that we do. We're not going to distinguish ourselves by accident. The reason why people think this, among other things, is because of a scenario that has been popularized by science fiction, which has received the name FOOM. What that means is that one day someone is going to discover the secret of AGI, superhuman intelligence, is going to turn on the system and two minutes later that system will take over the entire world, destroy humanity, make such fast progress in technology and science that we're all dead. Some people actually are predicting this in the next three months, which is insane. That scenario is completely unrealistic. This is not the way things work. The progress towards human level AI is going to be slow and incremental. We're going to start by having systems that may have the ability to potentially reach human level AI, but at first they're going to be as smart as a rat or a cat. And then we're going to crank them up and put some more guardrails to make sure they're safe and then work our way through smarter and smarter systems that are more and more controllable. It's going to be like the same process we used to make turbojets safe. It took decades and now you can fly across the Pacific on a two engine airplane. You couldn't do this 10 years ago. You had to have three or four engines because the reliability of turbojets was not that high. So it's going to be the same thing. A lot of complicated engineering.

I thought it was completely unrealistic. The point is these digital intelligences are going to be tremendously useful for things like medicine, for reading scans rapidly and accurately. It's been slightly slower than I expected, but it's coming. They're going to be tremendously useful for designing new nanomaterials so we can make more efficient solar cells, for example. They're going to be tremendously useful for predicting floods and earthquakes and getting better weather predictions. They're going to be tremendously useful in understanding climate change. So they're going to be developed. There's no way that's going to be stopped. So I thought it was maybe a sensible way of getting media attention, but it wasn't a sensible thing to ask for. It just wasn't feasible. What we should be asking for is that comparable resources are put into dealing with the bad possible side effects and dealing with how we keep these things under control as are put into developing them. At present, 99% of the money is going into developing them and 1% is going into people saying these things might be dangerous. It should be more like 50/50, I believe.

I don't despair, but mainly because even I find it very hard to take it seriously. It's very hard to get your head around the fact that we're at this very special point in history where in a relatively short time everything might totally change, a change of a scale we've never seen before. It's hard to absorb that.