The AI industry’s race to build ever-bigger models is heading toward a dead end, futurist Richard Yonck says.
Nearly a decade ago, in “Heart of the Machine” Yonck argued that computers would learn to recognize and respond to human emotion. Today, those systems can combine signals from voice, text, facial expressions and gestures. That’s exactly what makes them so powerful and potentially dangerous.
In this interview with Independence Avenue Media, Yonck examines the risks of AI that can simulate empathy, the use of realistic avatars and deepfakes in social engineering, and the difficulty governments face in regulating a technology that is developing faster than the rules around it.
He also explains why simply scaling large language models may produce diminishing returns. The next chapter, he argues, could belong to “experiential AI” — systems that learn from the physical world more like a child does.
