An AI ‘godfather’ says CEOs hyping job loss are ‘extremely destructive’—and your kids are paying the price

It’s become a common pattern over the past few months: A business leader makes an ominous claim about the impact of AI on the labor market, sparking weeks of discourse and sending U.S. workers reeling. Now, a “godfather” of AI is pushing back on those claims—and warning about the dangers they spur.

In an interview with Axios, Yann LeCun, former Meta AI chief who invented many of the fundamental components of AI like deep learning, said those doom narratives are wrong—and “extremely destructive.” 

“Don’t listen to CEOs,” he said. “They have a vested interest in propping up the power of the products they sell.” He said to instead listen to the economists, many of whom doubt the position that AI will wipe out large swaths of the entry-level white-collar workforce.  

LeCun, winner of the Turing Award (an annual prize for making lasting contributions to computer science) added that the sum of those warnings is “extremely destructive.”

“A small proportion of high school students are actually kind of depressed because they’ve read that AI is not only going to take a job, but basically cause human extinction,” he........

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