The last week, on Wednesday we got to witness an Artificial Intelligence debate by two of the biggest CEOs at the World AI Conference which took place in Shanghai. Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk and Alibaba’s co-founder Jack Ma had a healthy debate between them on the topic of Artificial Intelligence.
On one hand, Jack Ma’s approach towards the debate was optimistic. He went on with the thought that artificial intelligence does not possess any threat to humankind.
He believes that artificial intelligence would not be of any threat to us. They are rather just machines.
On another hand, Elon Musk had a different approach. He does think of Artificial Intelligence as a threat to our society.
Jack Ma joked that he calls AI as Alibaba’s Intelligence instead of Artificial Intelligence.
Elon Musk thinks that AI is just like any other species of living beings. Can chimpanzees understand humans? No, right. He believes that AI will grow to outsmart us and will think only to their own benefits instead of benefits for all. The only issue is that the AI ends up being a machine and it cannot think of anything smarter than them. He hoped that the existing AIs are good rather than evil.
He added that we have two options, either to defeat them or join them. Here he explained a bit of the Neuralink initiative.
Jack Ma started off by saying that he is not an expert in technology but he took a positive attitude about it. He said, “I think AI is going to open a new chapter of the society of the world that people try to understand ourselves better, rather than the outside world. And it’s so difficult to predict the future.”
Later they targeted each other saying how the other person’s predictions are wrong. Jack Ma added, “And I don’t think artificial intelligence is a threat. I don’t think artificial intelligence is something terrible, but human beings are smart enough to learn that.”
Elon Musk said, “It seemed to me some time ago with that you could sort of think of humanity as a biological boot loader for digital superintelligence.”
They went on discussing various topics such as Area 51 or landing human life on Mars.
Jack Ma ended the debate on a positive note that the AI can actually help human beings develop and understand themselves more.
