Elon Musk and Jack Ma fight about AI and Mars, but agree that ‘love is the answer’

• Elon Musk and Jack Ma came together at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai.
• The two geniuses took digs at each other as they spoke about Artificial Intelligence, Mars, aliens and more.
• Ma once again brought out his love quotient, and Musk agreed to say, ‘love is the answer’.

The world waited with bated breath as the greatest tech minds of the generation – Elon Musk and Jack Ma came together at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai.

As expected, sparks flew.

The geniuses behind Tesla and Alibaba had a war of words over Artificial Intelligence and much more. While Ma believes that AI is not a threat, Musk fears the intelligence of AI and computers.

In an hour long conversation, Ma and Musk took digs at each other. When Ma said that it’s impossible that human beings will be controlled by machines, Musk laughed out loud.

Jack Ma is not scared of AI, Musk calls them famous last words

Jack Ma: I’m not a tech guy, I think more about life. I think AI is going to open a new chapter of this society of the world, where people try to understand ourselves better, rather than outside the world. I’m quite optimistic, I don’t think AI is a threat or it is something terrible, human beings are smart enough to learn that. People like us are street smart, we’re never scared of that.

Elon Musk: I don’t know man, that’s like famous last words. In general, the rate of advancement of computers is insane. A good example would be video games. If you go back 40 years ago, you had Pong that was just two rectangles and a square. Now, you have got photo-realistic real time simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously. If you assume any rate of improvement at all, the games will be indistinctionable from reality. You will not be able to tell the difference. Either that or civilization will end. I’m naturally optimistic person to be clear, i'm just saying the rate of change of technology is very fast, its outpacing our ability to understand it.

Elon Musk is from Mars, Jack Ma is from Earth

Jack Ma: You want to go to Mars. I’m not interested in Mars, I’m more interested in Earth. Why are you so curious about Mars?

Musk: It’s important for us to take the set of actions that are most likely to continue consciousness into the future. We should not take it for granted that consciousness will continue, we haven’t encountered any aliens. Where are the aliens? This is the Fermi paradox. This is one of the most important questions. How come we’ve not found any aliens? There are people out there who think we have found aliens. Trust me, I would know, we have not.... People ask me you’ve been to Area 51, please.. at SpaceX actually has Area59, that’s 8 better.

One of those actions (we can take) is to become a multi-planet species or ensure that life is multi-planetary. Not from the centre point of an escape path, but there is a probability at a certain point that some either external force or some internal unforced error causes civilization to be destroyed or sufficiently impaired such that it can no longer extend it to another planet.

This is the first time in a 4-and-a-half billion year history of Earth, that it is possible to extend life beyond Earth.

Ma: I’m not a fan of Mars because I think it’s easy to go to Mars.

You need Love Quotient to survive the times of AI: Jack Ma

Jack Ma: In our company, if things are without logic, human beings can do better. For example, when you love someone, I have no reason. But when I hate someone, there is logic. At Ant financial, we teach the machine all the bad things, bad guys want to do, machine can learn quickly and arrest all the bad things but the good things, not necessarily.

Musk: AI means love.

Ma: That’s absolutely right. If you want to be successful, you have to have EQ and IQ. In the future if you want to survive you need to have the Love Quotient, otherwise you cannot survive in the time of AI.

Musk: I agree with it, Love is the answer.