Elon Musk & Jack Ma Debate AI at China Summit

Source: Interesting Engineering

Shanghai just hosted Tesla's CEO and founder Elon Musk, and none other than Jack Ma, billionaire, and co-founder of Alibaba was on stage with him. The two genius businessmen sat down at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference this year to discuss the role of artificial intelligence (AI) and how it will shape our future.

Musk and Ma opposed each other's opinions on several topics that they covered in their 48-minute long debate, most significantly how we perceive AI.

Elon Musk: why we should believe we're "very dumb."

According to Elon Musk, "The biggest mistake AI researchers make is assuming they're intelligent. They're not, compared to AI."

Musk states in the debate that AI will take over humans, and be "vastly" smarter than us.

Ma is of another opinion - AI doesn't pose such a threat to us and that we as humans are smart enough to gauge this. In fact, Ma goes so far as to say that AI will assist in opening us up to better understand ourselves.

Musk says he isn't sure what to do with the type of situation where AI will be smarter than humans. All he has to say is: "I hope they're nice."

Along with hoping for kind AI, Musk guesses that "For computers, talking with humans will be like talking to a tree."

In other words, AI will surpass us with its "insane" rate of advancement. Musk uses the rather accurate example that only 30 or 40 years ago, the main computer game that existed was "Pong," which was a very simplistic game. Compare that to nowadays, where games have 4D realistic environments and virtual reality.

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