Yahoo Finance Elon Musk’s AI warning ‘like Catholic church ban on printing presses’
Elon Musk’s attempt to halt advances in artificial intelligence (AI) is no different to the Catholic Church’s opposition to printing presses in the Middle Ages, a leading Silicon Valley scientist has suggested.
Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist at Facebook-owner Meta, has mocked Mr Musk’s plea to halt advanced AI research for six months.
Mr LeCun posted on Twitter: “The year is 1440 and the Catholic Church has called for a 6 months moratorium on the use of the printing press and the movable type.
“Imagine what could happen if commoners get access to books! They could read the Bible for themselves and society would be destroyed.”
The satirical post refers to an open letter signed by Mr Musk on Wednesday that called for a six month pause on advanced AI research.
Chatbots such as ChatGPT and the large language model (LLM) software powering it, GPT-4, are beginning to approach human-level intelligence, according to its creators.
The open letter, written by the Future of Life Institute, warned that “out of control” AI could “pose profound risks to society and humanity” and demanded all AI labs halt their work on advancing the technology.
Other signatories of the letter included Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and the head of the Doomsday Clock organisation.
Mr LeCun said the printing press “also enabled the Enlightenment”, inviting a comparison between one of the Western world’s founding technologies and modern advances in artificial intelligence.
Mr Musk was an early investor in OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, but cashed out after a few years, saying its research clashed with his electric car company Tesla’s efforts to develop self-driving automation technology.
A writer for Time magazine suggested the moratorium on advanced AI research should be enforced through an international treaty agreement and even military action.
Eliezer Yudkowsky, who describes himself as a “decision theorist”, wrote on Thursday: “The most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die.
“Shut down all the large GPU clusters (the large computer farms where the most powerful AIs are refined),” he continued.
“If intelligence says that a country outside the agreement is building a GPU cluster, be less scared of a shooting conflict between nations than of the moratorium being violated; be willing to destroy a rogue data centre by airstrike.”
