On Wednesday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Alibaba, co-founder of Tesla, Jack Ma took the stage at the World AI Conference in Shanghai to discuss artificial intelligence and its implications for humanity. As expected, Ma took a much more optimistic attitude than Musk. Ma encouraged people to have faith in humanity, our creativity and the future. “I don't think artificial intelligence is a threat,” he said, to which Musk replied, “I don't know, man, that's like famous last words.” An edited copy of the discussion follows. Elon Musk: What should we say? Just things about AI maybe? Yes. OKAY. Have a look. Jack Ma: The AI, right? OK, great.
EM: I actually heard that AI means love? There is like a name, AI, it sounds a bit like love? JM: Yes, AI, AI, I hate the word “AI ” which is called artificial intelligence. I call it Alibaba intelligence. Yes, maybe it will eventually become true. You never know. I think that people generally underestimate the ability of AI. They kind of think it's a smart person. But it is, it really is much more than that, it will be much more. It will be much smarter than the smartest person. It will be like, can a chimpanzee really understand people? Not really, you know. We just look like strange aliens. They usually just care about other chimpanzees. And so it will be more or less in relativity. Actually, if the difference is so small, that would be amazing. It is probably much, much bigger. So, the biggest mistake I see that artificial intelligence researchers make is the assumption that they are intelligent. Yes, they are not, compared to AI. And so many of them cannot imagine anything smarter than themselves, but AI will be much smarter. So what do you do with such a situation? I'm not sure. Do you know. I hope they are nice. I mean, of course I have a number, you know, I think in a situation where if you, you know, the old saying, if you can't beat them, you're there too. You know, that's what Neuralink is about. Can we go with AI on the ride with AI? I mean, I really think there should be other companies like Neuralink, essentially, to create a high bandwidth interface to the brain.
Because at the moment we are already a cyborg. People do not realize that we are already a cyborg. Because we are so well integrated with our phones and computers. The telephone is almost an extension of yourself. If you forget your phone, it's like a missing member. But the bandwidth, the communication bandwidth to the phone is very low, especially the input. So in fact the bandwidth of the input from the computers has even decreased, because typing with two thumbs, as opposed to 10 fingers, is a big reduction in bandwidth. The bandwidth of the input has increased due to video and images. The input bandwidth is therefore many times larger than the output bandwidth. But at some point, if we only assume a benign scenario with AI, we will just be too slow. So you know, I think I always think that human speech, against a computer, will sound like a very slow, tonal wheezing. It's just like whale sounds … JM: You have a vision about technology. I'm not a techie. I think I'm all for life. I think AI is going to open a new chapter of the world's society, that people are trying to understand ourselves better than the outside world. And it's so hard to predict the future. 99.99 percent of human predictions in history about the future – all wrong. AdEM: Including that one? JM: Oh, yes. Only you know that 0.00 percent of the predictions are correct. They are right, but by accident. EM: Yes. But it is also true that 80 percent of the statistics are false. JM: I am happy with artificial intelligence, or Alibaba intelligence, that will better understand a person, the inside of a person.
So when people worry a lot about artificial intelligence, people need to have more confidence in themselves. Because I think there are many solutions that we don't have today, but tomorrow there will be solutions. We have no solutions, but the young people will have solutions. So I'm pretty optimistic. And I don't think artificial intelligence is a threat. I don't think artificial intelligence is anything terrible, but people are smart enough to learn that. And for me, artificial intelligence is just like artificial intelligence – people worry a lot about it today – that's those people, I called them smartness at college. People like us, street smart, we're not afraid of that. We think it's a big fun, and we want to challenge ourselves to embrace it. EM: I don't know, man, that's kind of famous last words: “We're already a cyborg. Because we're so well integrated With our phones and computers: “Elon Musk Let me tell you, in general, that the pace of computers' progress is insane. Video games are a good example of this. You know, if you go back 40 years ago, maybe 50 years ago, you had Pong, that was just two rectangles and a square. Now you have real-time photo-realistic simulations with millions of people playing at the same time. If you like