LeCun slams AI doom scenarios: p(doom) estimates are pulled out of thin air
ylecun · x · 2026-11-15
Yann LeCun argued in a long thread that in democratic societies, everyone shares responsibility for maximizing technology's benefits and minimizing its side effects — AI's benefits are real and expanding, while bad side effects have so far been minimal.
He called catastrophe scenarios (extinction, employment apocalypse) "totally ridiculous" for anyone who understands how things work in the real world, and said p(doom) estimates are pulled out of their authors' back ends: it makes no sense to assign probabilities to events over which humans have complete agency — such a number merely reveals a lack of confidence that fellow humans will do the right thing. He named two disagreements with Geoffrey Hinton: confidence in humanity, and the primacy of intelligence (thread truncated).
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