Tech giants, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, took to social media to throw jabs at each other over artificial Intelligence. Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, believes AI poses a risk to humans, while Facebook founder Zuckerberg believes AI is the future of humanity and would make the world better.
We all know that Zuckerberg is pro artificial Intelligence, AI, and created his own personal assistant imbued with artificial intelligence, called Jarvis, which plays with his family and meets a number of their needs. On the other hand, Elon Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, believes artificial intelligence poses a risk to the existence of civilisation and he continually pushes for its proactive regulation.
It all started when earlier in July, Musk told a gathering of US governors that artificial intelligence will cause massive job disruption, that robots “will be able to do everything better than us.” He encouraged the governors to move to regulate AI.
“I keep sounding the alarm bell, but until people see robots going down the street killing people, they don’t know how to react, because it seems so ethereal,” he said.
Musk also expressed dire concern over a future shared with robots, saying:
“I have exposure to the most cutting edge AI, and I think people should be really concerned by it.”
Zuckerberg dismissed these concerns on Sunday afternoon from his backyard in Palo Alto, California. While smoking meats, he went live on Facebook to touch on the topic of artificial Intelligence and took questions from viewers. A user sent a question, which Zuckerberg read out loud:
“I watched a recent interview with Elon Musk and his largest fear for future was AI. What are your thoughts on AI and how it could affect the world?”
Zuckerberg replied that he was opposed to the spread of fear surrounding the potential of artificial intelligence.
“I have pretty strong opinions on this. I am optimistic,” says Zuckerberg. “I think you can build things and the world gets better. But with AI especially, I am really optimistic. And I think people who are naysayers and try to drum up these doomsday scenarios — I just, I don’t understand it. It’s really negative and in some ways, I actually think it is pretty irresponsible.”
He added: “In the next five to 10 years, AI is going to deliver so many improvements in the quality of our lives.”
Zuckerberg says artificial intelligence is already helping diagnose diseases. He also mentioned self-driving cars and said they will help reduce car accidents.
“Whenever I hear people saying AI is going to hurt people in the future, I think yeah, you know, technology can generally always be used for good and bad, and you need to be careful about how you build it and you need to be careful about what you build and how it is going to be used. But people who are arguing for slowing down the process of building AI, I just find that really questionable. I have a hard time wrapping my head around that,” Zuckerberg says.
Two days later, during an exchange on Twitter, Musk was asked about Zuckerberg’s Facebook Live comment and he wrote that he has discussed the topic with Zuckerberg and that “his understanding of the subject is limited.”
Musk has been issuing warnings about the dangers of AI for years. He expressed concerns that humans will become second-class citizens in a future dominated by AI or we will face a Terminator-style uprising where smart machines could start wars or kill people in streets. To avoid this, over a year ago, Musk took part in creating a nonprofit research company devoted to developing artificial intelligence that will help people and not hurt them.
This will not be the first time Zuckerberg and Musk will have a public squabble. Last September, SpaceX was scheduled to launch an internet-beaming satellite intended for use by Facebook’s Free Basics project in Africa. However, the Falcon 9 rocket exploded, destroying both the rocket and the AMOS-6 satellite that Facebook planned to use to deliver internet connectivity to rural parts of Africa.
Zuckerberg was not happy and took to his Facebook page to write: “As I’m here in Africa, I’m deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX’s launch failure destroyed our satellite that would have provided connectivity to so many entrepreneurs and everyone else across the continent.”
