Jack Ma and Elon Musk talk AI in Shanghai

The second World Artificial Intelligence Conference commenced Thursday in Shanghai. During the opening ceremony, Alibaba Group chairman Jack Ma and Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, had a 45-minute discussion on AI and human life. Here are the five big themes they talked about.

I. On AI:

Elon Musk:

People underestimate the capabilities of AI. They think it's a smart human. It's much more than that. The common mistake that AI researchers make is to assume that they are intelligent. They are not. AI will be vastly smarter. I' m not a naturally optimistic person. The rate of change of technology is so radically fast that it is… outpacing our capabilities to understand.

Jack Ma:

AI is going to open a chapter of the world that people try to understand ourselves better. Ninety-nine-point-nine-nine percent of the predications human beings had about future are all wrong, and the 0.001 percent are right by accident. I am happy about the AI that's going to understand the insights of humans better. People should have more confidence in themselves. I don't think AI is a threat or something terrible. Human beings are smart enough to learn that.

II. On living on Mars

Elon Musk:

The thing about Mars is that it's important for us to take the sort of action that is most likely to continue consciousness into the future. We should not take it for granted that consciousness will continue. Among the sets of actions we can take that are likely to increase the scope and scale of consciousness (so that we are better able to understand the nature of the universe) – one of those actions is to become a multi-planet species, or to ensure that life is multi-planetary. This is the first time in the 4.5 billion years history of the Earth that it is possible to extend life beyond Earth. And less than one percent of resources should dedicated to making life multi-planetary.

Jack Ma:

I admire your courage to explore Mars, but I admire a lot of people spending (making) their efforts improving the Earth. How can we make the world more sustainable? People are spending more time on Earth thinking about how long the civilization of the human beings will be. We can only live for 100 years. So we cannot solve all the problems for the future, but we have to be responsible about the future. By AI, when human beings understand ourselves better, then we can improve the world better. What I am excited about AI is that they understand people. We need a hero like you (to explore Mars). But we need heroes like us working hard on the Earth improving things every day.