Elon Musk and Jack Ma were never going to see eye to eye on everything, and their discussion (debate, at times) at the World AI Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai yesterday had some interesting exchanges.

For those who don’t know, Jack Ma is the executive chairman of Alibaba, and also a kung-fu star.

During their 45-minute pow-wow, Elon talked about some of SpaceX’s plans, like getting humans to Mars, but he wasn’t afraid of going off on some odd tangents.

Mashable describes one such exchange:

“I think it’s important for us to take the set of actions that are most likely to continue consciousness into the future,” he said. “I think we should not take it for granted that consciousness will continue because we have not encountered any aliens.”

“Where are the aliens? This is the Fermi Paradox. This is one of the most important questions: how come we have not found any aliens? There are people out there who think that we’ve found aliens. Trust me, I would know, we have not.”

Yes, there’s actually an unwritten international law that if you discover alien life, you have to notify Elon Musk first.

Them’s the rules.

Ma and Musk also discussed how AI is rapidly evolving – perhaps faster than we can keep up with:

“Assuming a benign scenario with AI, we will just be too slow,” he said. “Human speech to a computer will sound like very slow tonal wheezing, kind of like whale sounds.”

In contrast, Ma said he was “quite optimistic” about how AI would benefit humanity.

“I don’t think AI is a threat,” he said. “I don’t think AI is something terrible.”

Musk’s response: “I don’t know, man, that’s like famous last words.” He added that technology’s rate of advancement is “outpacing our ability to understand it.”

It’s like Ma hasn’t seen I, Robot.

Here’s their exchange about the intelligence of computers versus humans:

Whilst they were on-topic in the video above, the same cannot really be said for this exchange.

We’re talking about jobs…or are we?

This weird 90 second clip of the Ma-Musk debate perfectly captures the bizarre mood of the entire thing. Note: the topic of this moment of the debate was, allegedly, jobs. pic.twitter.com/EtR3iFvx0m

— Marcus Gilmer (@marcusgilmer) August 29, 2019

This is what happens when you don’t have a moderator to rein things back in.

All in all, a reasonably interesting discussion between two very self-assured billionaires – you can read more about that here.

For those who want to go in deep, here’s the full interview:

[source:mashable]