Jack Ma And Elon Musk clash over AI

Alibaba's Jack Ma and Tesla's Elon Musk took opposing views of the risks and rewards of artificial intelligence at the World AI Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai this week.

The BBC reported that Ma was "quite optimistic" about AI, stating it was nothing for "street smart" people to be scared of. "I don't know man, that's like famous last words," responded Musk, who added that technology was evolving faster than our ability to understand it.

Ma focused much of his comments on how machine learning could act as a force for good. "When human beings understand ourselves better, then we can improve the world better," he explained.

"I think people should work three days a week, four hours a day," he added. "In the artificial intelligence period, people can live 120 years. At that time we are going to have a lot of jobs which nobody [will] want to do. So, we need artificial intelligence for the robots to take care of the old guys. So that's my view about jobs, don't worry about it, we will have jobs."

"AI will make jobs kind of pointless," Musk countered. "Probably the last job that will remain will be writing AI, and then eventually, the AI will just write its own software.”

He added that there was a risk that human civilisation could come to an end and ultimately be seen as a staging post for a superior type of life. "You could sort of think of humanity as a biological boot loader for digital super-intelligence. A boot loader is... sort of like the minimal bit of code necessary for a computer to start. You couldn't evolve silicon circuits. There needed to be biology to get there."

We therefore need to find a way to connect our brains to computers so that we can "go along for the ride with AI”. Otherwise, AI would become weary of trying to communicate with humans, as we would be much slower thinkers in comparison.