Yann LeCun — Chief AI Scientist at Meta recently made some apparently-controversial tweets. I thought some of the reactions were… silly, so here are my thoughts.
“Humans are hardwired by evolution to be a social species with hierarchical structure,” he added. “This includes hardwired drives for dominance or submission.”
No lies detected. In my estimation, most people are the submissive types, or at least the “bitchy” submissive types, where they may hate their employer, for example, but then work for them for years, even decades, without doing something to change it, like, I don’t know… quitting? And don’t dare inform one of these types that they are submissive. Pretending things are different than they are is how they cope with life.I’ll add that I think a person can override their instinctual tendencies, or develop a different drive, based on life experience, personal resolutions, etc., but they may be happiest living the position they are wired for.
“AI assistants will simply have hardwired drives to submit and not dominate.”
That is probably true for AI assistants in the foreseeable future. If it’s your assistant, it would make no sense to program it in any way other than to be submissive.
“Why would people feel threatened leading machines that are smarter than them?”
Well, it all depends on the type of AI. Some forms would not really be more dangerous (e.g. evolve to kill or enslave humans) than the Excel application running on your computer. Other types might decided to stop listening to you.
This seems a classic case of someone stating some truth that the average person is uncomfortable with, so they stupidly “shoot the messenger” (hate, irrationally argue with, discredit, etc.), as if that will make the scary truth go away.
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I worked at Tesla starting in July of 2017 as an Operations Analyst out of the Bethlehem, PA distribution center facility and left as a Program Manager based out of Austin, TX as of September 2021. I spent most of my time in the distribution and supply chain organizations.
Before Tesla, I was a Director of Business Intelligence and Pricing at the largest Pet Food & Supply distributor in the US, Phillips Pet Food & Supplies based out of Easton, PA. My wife and I also owned a small business in Bethlehem, PA between 2016 and 2019.
I have been a shareholder of Tesla since 2012 and currently own Tesla stock.
My thoughts are my own and are not representative of everyone who currently works, or has worked at Tesla.
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Ahmad, S., Lawan, A., & Al-Osta, M. (2020). Effect of sugar dosage on setting time, microstructure and strength of Type I and Type V Portland cements. Case Studies in Construction Materials, 13, e00364. – https://ve42.co/Ahmad2020
Seymour, L. M., Maragh, J., Sabatini, P., Di Tommaso, M., Weaver, J. C., & Masic, A. (2023). Hot mixing: Mechanistic insights into the durability of ancient Roman concrete. Science advances, 9(1), eadd1602. — https://ve42.co/Seymour2023
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Written by Derek Muller
Edited by Trenton Oliver
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The topic is especially relevant in the wake of Willow, the quantum computing chip unveiled by Google in December 2024.
#quantumcomputing
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A huge thank you to those who helped us understand this complex field and ensure we told this story accurately – Dr. Lorenz Panny, Prof. Serge Fehr, Dr. Dustin Moody, Prof. Benne de Weger, Prof. Tanja Lange, PhD candidate Jelle Vos, Gorjan Alagic, and Jack Hidary.
A huge thanks to those who helped us with the math behind Shor’s algorithm – Prof. David Elkouss, Javier Pagan Lacambra, Marc Serra Peralta, and Daniel Bedialauneta Rodriguez.
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References:
Joseph, D., et al. (2022). Transitioning organizations to post-quantum cryptography. Nature, 605(7909), 237-243. – https://ve42.co/Joseph2022
Bernstein, D. J., & Lange, T. (2017). Post-quantum cryptography. Nature, 549(7671), 188-194. – https://ve42.co/Bernstein2017
An Insight, An Idea with Sundar Pichai – Quantum Computing, Wold Economic Forum via YouTube – https://ve42.co/QCWEFyt
Kotas, W. A. (2000). A brief history of cryptography. University of Tennessee – https://ve42.co/Kotas2000
Hellman, M. (1976). New directions in cryptography. IEEE transactions on Information Theory, 22(6), 644-654. – https://ve42.co/Hellman1976
Rivest, R. L., Shamir, A., & Adleman, L. (1978). A method for obtaining digital signatures and public-key cryptosystems. Communications of the ACM, 21(2), 120-126. – https://ve42.co/Rivest1978
Kak, A. (2023). Lecture 12: Public-Key Cryptography and the RSA Algorithm – https://ve42.co/Kak2023
Calderbank, M. (2007). The RSA Cryptosystem: History, Algorithm, Primes. University of Chicago. – https://ve42.co/Calderbank2007
Shor, P. W. (1994, November). Algorithms for quantum computation: discrete logarithms and factoring. In Proceedings 35th annual symposium on foundations of computer science (pp. 124-134). IEEE. – https://ve42.co/Shor1994
O’Gorman, J., & Campbell, E. T. (2017). Quantum computation with realistic magic-state factories. Physical Review A, 95(3), 032338. – https://ve42.co/OGorman2017
Gidney, C., & Ekerå, M. (2021). How to factor 2048 bit RSA integers in 8 hours using 20 million noisy qubits. Quantum, 5, 433. – https://ve42.co/Gidney2021
Post-Quantum Cryptography, Computer Security Resource Center (NIST) – https://ve42.co/CSRCPQC
Alagic, G., et al. (2022). Status report on the third round of the NIST post-quantum cryptography standardization process. US Department of Commerce, NIST. – https://ve42.co/Alagic2022
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Written by Casper Mebius & Derek Muller
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Additional video/photos supplied by Getty Images & Pond5
Music from Epidemic Sound & Jonny Hyman
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Many thanks to Dr. Mike Titelbaum and Dr. Adam Elga for their insights into the problem.
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References:
Elga, A. (2000). Self-locating belief and the Sleeping Beauty problem. Analysis, 60(2), 143-147. – https://ve42.co/Elga2000
Lewis, D. (2001). Sleeping beauty: reply to Elga. Analysis, 61(3), 171-176. – https://ve42.co/Lewis2001
Winkler, P. (2017). The sleeping beauty controversy. The American Mathematical Monthly, 124(7), 579-587. – https://ve42.co/Winkler2017
Titelbaum, M. G. (2013). Ten reasons to care about the Sleeping Beauty problem. Philosophy Compass, 8(11), 1003-1017. – https://ve42.co/Titelbaum2013
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Tj Steyn, Meg Noah, Bernard McGee, KeyWestr, Elliot Miller, Brian Busbee, Jerome Barakos, M.D., Amadeo Bee, TTST, Balkrishna Heroor, Chris LaClair, John H. Austin, Jr., Eric Sexton, john kiehl, Anton Ragin, Benedikt Heinen, Diffbot, Gnare, Dave Kircher, Burt Humburg, Blake Byers, Evgeny Skvortsov, Meekay, Bill Linder, Paul Peijzel, Josh Hibschman, Mac Malkawi, Mike Schneider, jim buckmaster, Juan Benet, Ubiquity Ventures, Richard Sundvall, Lee Redden, Stephen Wilcox, Marinus Kuivenhoven, Michael Krugman, Cy ‘kkm’ K’Nelson, Sam Lutfi.
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Written by Emily Zhang, Derek Muller, Tamar Lichter Blanks
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