There have been fears over how a super-intelligent Artificial Intelligence could look to subdue and control humans once it becomes sufficiently advanced, but a prominent voice in the space says that these concerns might be overblown.
Meta’s AI Chief Yann LeCun has said that AI systems will have no desire to dominate humans. “There is the sort of implied idea that if a system is intelligent, it wants to somehow take over or dominate,” he said in an interview. “And that’s just completely false. Not only is it false, it’s not even true within the human species. You know, it is not the smartest among us who want to be the chief, right? We have examples on the political scene,” he added.
“The idea is somehow that intelligence is necessarily associated with a desire to dominate is just false. To have a desire to dominate or not a desire, but just even dominate by accident, there has to be some hardwired drive into the entity — competition for resources, for example, or for influencing other entities to be able to profit from it or whatever,” he explained.
“The desire to dominate is. a unique characteristic of social species within the within the turf of biology. So you have domination and submission behavior in baboons, you may have that in chimpanzees, you have them in wolves, and dogs, and you have them in humans. But then take orangutans, orangutans are not social. They are solitary and they’re territorial as a matter of fact, and they don’t have any desire to dominate anybody because like, you know, they don’t need to. So this idea that there is an intrinsic desire to dominate that is leaked with intelligence is just false,” he explained.
LeCun seemed to be saying that intelligence might not be correlated with a desire to dominate. Humans and most mammals look to dominate each other and other species because they’re hardwired to do so through evolution — mammals must compete with one other for limited resources, and are hardwired to reproduce and propagate their species. But an intelligent system that hasn’t been told it needs to propagate itself and its progeny might not have the need to dominate other species — it could just be content to be a helper to the species that look to use it for assistance. Its an interesting argument, and while not everyone agrees with Yann LeCun on this idea, it does make a compelling case for why many of the current fears around AI might not end up coming true.