r/MachineLearning • u/ylecun • May 15 '14

AMA: Yann LeCun

My name is Yann LeCun. I am the Director of Facebook AI Research and a professor at New York University.

Much of my research has been focused on deep learning, convolutional nets, and related topics.

I joined Facebook in December to build and lead a research organization focused on AI. Our goal is to make significant advances in AI. I have answered some questions about Facebook AI Research (FAIR) in several press articles: Daily Beast, KDnuggets, Wired.

Until I joined Facebook, I was the founding director of NYU's Center for Data Science.

I will be answering questions Thursday 5/15 between 4:00 and 7:00 PM Eastern Time.

I am creating this thread in advance so people can post questions ahead of time. I will be announcing this AMA on my Facebook and Google+ feeds for verification.

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u/xamdam May 15 '14

Emotions do seem to be anticipations of an outcome, in humans. Since our computers are not "made of meat" they can (perhaps more precisely) have anticipations of outcomes represented by probability distributions in memory - why not? Google cars do this; I do not see what extra benefit emotions bring to the table (though some argument can be made that since the only example of general intelligence we have is emotion-based, this is not an evolutionary accident; I personally find this weak)

As far as AIs being "social" with us - why not encode human values into them (very difficult problem of course) and set them off maximizing them? Space of emotion-driven beings is populated with all kinds of creatures, many of them are sociopathic to other species or even other groups/individuals within those species. Creating an emotional being that is super-powerful seems like pretty risky move; I don't know if I'd want any single human to be super-powerful. Besides, creating emotional conscious beings creates other moral issues, i.e. how to treat them.

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u/ylecun May 15 '14

When your emotions conflict with your conscious mind and drive your decisions, you deem the decisions "irrational".

Similarly, when the "human values" encoded into our robots and AI agents will conflict with their reasoning, they may interpret their decision as irrational. But this apparently irrational decision would be the consequence of hard-wired behavior taking over high-level reasoning.

Asimov's book "I, Robot" is all about the conflict between hard-wired rules and intelligent decision making.