Billionaires Jack Ma vs. Elon Musk debate in Shanghai China at World Artificial Intelligence

The robots are coming!

AI is in the news everywhere you look. The spectrum of predictions is entertaining and somewhat hilarious; from sentient Skynet like robots to the singularity. One thing is certain, predicting any future event is a cognitive bias we all should keep in mind. It’s nice to tickle our senses and day dream, but the reality is no one knows what the future looks like.

Recently, 2 Billionaires debated in Shanghai China about World Artificial Intelligence; Jack Ma the founder of Alibaba and Elon Musk aka Tony Stark, former cofounder of PayPal and currently a founder of Tesla, SpaceX, Hyperloop and Neuralink.

This was a rather weird interview. Elon Musk had to start the interview even tho he was invited to Shanghai to discuss AI with Jack and then there is the entertaining polar opposite views about the future of AI.

Enjoy!

Full Interview

OR watch this 5 mins version version which illustrates how weird this interview was.

General Intelligence vs Specialized Intelligence

There is a HUGE difference between general intelligence and specialized intelligence. It’s illogical to compare human (general intelligence) to specialized intelligence (machine task based intelligence) UNLESS we compare tasks each can/do perform and just like that… machines outperform humans.

Elon Musk was giving examples of specialized intelligence eg. Deep Blue, iPhones, are all number crunchers, which YES outperform humans. Just like most manufacturing robots outperform humans. Jack Ma’s reply that no machine invented humans is a straw man argument and illustrates how little he knows about AI. I guess money talks after all.

Will we ever create general intelligence? No one knows. What is certain is;

(a) we still don’t understand how the brain works,
(b) neural networks in machine learning only scratch at the basics of how neurons work in the human brain and
(c) let’s not forget the vastness of venture backed companies faking AI using offshore labor to fake specialized intelligence.

So let’s not get caught up in robots/AI taking over our jobs.