After years of futuristic story plots and prognostications, artificial intelligence (AI) is a technology that appears to be catching up with its hype. Designed to perform and automate cognitive tasks that once required human brainpower, AI has been advancing rapidly of late—in fact, too rapidly for some. The sound of alarm bells has been jarring at times. Critics, including insiders, have made headlines expressing concerns that AI could cause societal harm by overtaking human intelligence, stealing jobs from knowledge workers and perhaps going rogue as it develops a mind of its own. In March 2023, a group of some 1,100 technologists and researchers, including Elon Musk, signed an open letter calling for a six-month moratorium on AI development to assess perceived threats. The letter warned of the potential for “non-human minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us.” As a long-time technology executive and entrepreneur who’s been working for the past seven years to harness the power of AI to drive business value and efficiency, I find these concerns to be premature at best, if not highly overwrought. Instead, I tend to agree with the thoughts of Yann LeCun, one of the three so-called “godfathers of AI,” who argues that we’re years and perhaps decades away from AI surpassing the human intellect.

Full opinion : Overcoming Fear To Realize The Benefits Of Artificial Intelligence.