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Artificial Intelligence | Munk Debates

June 22, 2023

Artificial Intelligence

Be it resolved, AI research and development poses an existential threat.

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Be it resolved, AI research and development poses an existential threat.

With the debut of ChatGPT, the AI once promised in some distant future seems to have suddenly arrived with the potential to reshape our working lives, culture, politics and society. For proponents of AI based on large language models (LLMs) we are entering a period of unprecedented technological change that will boost productivity, unleash human creativity and empower billions in ways we have only begun to fathom. Others think we should be worried about the dangers of AI based LLMs. For their detractors, AIs like ChatGPT herald a brave new world of deep fakes and mass propaganda that could dwarf anything our democracies have experienced to date. Immense economic and political power will also concentrate around the corporations who control these unregulated technologies and their treasure troves of data. And, there is the real risk that authoritarian regimes will inevitably use and abuse this technology to control their societies and undermine their democratic rivals.

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The Debaters

Max Tegmark

"The real threat from advanced AI isn't malice, but competence: intelligent machines accomplishing goals that aren't aligned with ours."

Max Tegmark

"The real threat from advanced AI isn't malice, but competence: intelligent machines accomplishing goals that aren't aligned with ours."

Max Tegmark is a professor doing AI and physics research at MIT as part of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence & Fundamental Interactions and the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines. He advocates for positive use of technology as president of the Future of Life Institute. He is the author of over 300 publications as well as the New York Times bestsellers Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence and Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality. His most recent AI research focuses on mechanistic interpretability as well as news bias detection with machine-learning.

Yann LeCun

"The amplification of human intelligence by machine intelligence will enable a new period of Enlightenment. Prophecies of AI-fueled doom are nothing more than a new form of obscurantism."

Yann LeCun

"The amplification of human intelligence by machine intelligence will enable a new period of Enlightenment. Prophecies of AI-fueled doom are nothing more than a new form of obscurantism."

Yann LeCun is VP & Chief AI Scientist at Meta and Silver Professor at NYU affiliated with the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences & the Center for Data Science. He was the founding Director of FAIR and of the NYU Center for Data Science. He received an Engineering Diploma from ESIEE (Paris) and a PhD from Sorbonne Université. After a postdoc in Toronto he joined AT&T Bell Labs in 1988, and AT&T Labs in 1996 as Head of Image Processing Research. He joined NYU as a professor in 2003 and Meta/Facebook in 2013. His interests include AI, machine learning, computer perception, robotics, and computational neuroscience. He is the recipient of the 2018 ACM Turing Award (with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio) for "conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing", a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the French Académie des Sciences.