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June 22, 2023

Artificial Intelligence

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

Scroll down for details on viewing the Munk Debate on Artificial Intelligence. 

Pro
Yoshua Bengio
Max Tegmark
Con
Yann LeCun
Melanie Mitchell
Result
Con wins by a 4% gain.

Mainstream Media

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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, 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 very concerned about the rapid and unregulated development of machine intelligence. For their detractors, AI applications 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 may also concentrate around the corporations who control these technologies and their treasure troves of data. Finally, there is an existential concern that we could, in some not-so-distant future, lose control of powerful AIs who, in turn, pursue goals that are antithetical to humanity’s interests and our survival as a species.

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Vote Results

Pro
Con

Pre-debate

67%

33%

Post-debate

64%

36%

Con wins by a 4% gain

The Debaters

Yoshua Bengio

"If a small organization, somebody with crazy beliefs, conspiracy theorists, terrorists, or a military organization decides to use this technology without the right safety mechanisms it could be catastrophic for humanity."

Yoshua Bengio

"If a small organization, somebody with crazy beliefs, conspiracy theorists, terrorists, or a military organization decides to use this technology without the right safety mechanisms it could be catastrophic for humanity."

Recognized worldwide as one of the leading experts in artificial intelligence, Yoshua Bengio is most known for his pioneering work in deep learning, earning him the 2018 A.M. Turing Award, “the Nobel Prize of Computing,” with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun.

He is a Full Professor at Université de Montréal, and the Founder and Scientific Director of Mila – Quebec AI Institute. He co-directs the CIFAR Learning in Machines & Brains program as Senior Fellow and acts as Scientific Director of IVADO.

In 2019, he was awarded the prestigious Killam Prize and in 2022, became the computer scientist with the highest h-index in the world. He is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of London and Canada, Knight of the Legion of Honor of France and Officer of the Order of Canada.

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.

Melanie Mitchell

"AI does not have the kind of agency to make decisions and to enable the kind of event that would wipe out civilization, and thus does not represent an existential threat"

Melanie Mitchell

"AI does not have the kind of agency to make decisions and to enable the kind of event that would wipe out civilization, and thus does not represent an existential threat"

Melanie Mitchell is a Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Her current research focuses on conceptual abstraction, analogy-making, and visual recognition in artificial intelligence systems.

Melanie is the author or editor of six books and numerous scholarly papers in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and complex systems. Her book Complexity: A Guided Tour (Oxford University Press) won the 2010 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Award and was named by Amazon.com as one of the ten best science books of 2009. Her latest book is Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans.

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.