When Elon Met Jack: Musings on AI, Mars and the End of Civilization
When Elon Met Jack: Musings on AI, Mars and the End of
Civilization
Held at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in
Shanghai, the rare debate between China’s richest man and one of America’s more
controversial billionaires began with thoughts on AI -- Ma is betting humans
will prevail over machines, while Musk fears doomsday is coming -- but the
conversation, which went viral on social media, soon transgressed into areas
such as Mars exploration and aliens.
Below are some of the more memorable exchanges, which have been
edited lightly for clarity.
On Artificial Intelligence
Musk: People underestimate the capability of AI. They sort of
think like it’s a smart human. (But it’s going to be) much smarter than the
smartest human you will ever know.
Ma: I never in my life say human beings will be controlled by
machines, it’s impossible...Human beings can never create another thing that is
smarter than human beings.
Musk: I very much disagree with that. The biggest mistake I see
people making is to assume they’re smart.
Ma: My view is that computers might be more clever, human beings
are much smarter.
Musk: Yeah, definitely
not.
Ma: I’m quite optimistic and I don’t think artificial
intelligence is a threat. I don’t think artificial intelligence is something
terrible but human beings are smart enough to learn that...People like us --
street smart -- we’re never scared of that.
Musk: I don’t know man, that’s like famous last words...If you
go back 40 years ago, 50 years ago maybe, you had Pong -- that was just two
rectangles and a square. Now you’ve got 40 realistic real time simulations with
millions people playing simultaneously. If you assume any rate of improvement
at all, I mean these games will be indistinguishable from reality. You will not
be able to tell the difference. Either that or civilization will end.
Ma: Clever is knowledge-driven, smarter is experience-driven.
Computers are only one of the clever tools that humans created, computers are
clever, but there will be more tools that human beings will create that are
much more clever than computers.
Musk: (AI is) going to get to a point where it just completely
simulates a person, like many people simultaneously, in fact obviously there’s
a strong argument that we’re in a simulation right now.
On Population
Ma: The best resource on earth is not the clothes, not the oil,
not the electricity -- it’s the human brain.
Musk: I agree with the birth rate problem that you alluded to
earlier. Most people believe that we have too many people on the planet. This
is an outdated view. Assuming AI is fine, assuming there’s a benevolent AI, the
biggest problem the world will face in 20 years is a population collapse.
Ma: I absolutely agree with that, the population will be facing
a huge challenge.
Musk: The common rebuttal is immigration. Yeah like from where?
Ma:
Yeah, you want to immigrate to Mars.
Musk:
Mars needs people. There’s zero people there.
Jobs, Education:
Ma: People worry about jobs, but I worry about education. The
way we teach our kids are mainly designed for the industrial period.. How can
we make human beings smarter and wiser? I think we need to change the way of
education...How can we teach our kids to be more creative and constructive?
This is the key...Computers only have chips, men have hearts. It’s the heart
where the wisdom comes from. For the next 10, 20 years, every human being,
country, government should focus on reforming the education system, making sure
our kids can find jobs, a job that only requires three days a week, four hours
a day...If we don’t change the education system we are in, we will all be in
trouble.
Musk: Close the loop on being less wrong about the future. I’d
say that’s the right way to think about education. I mean down the road with a
Neuralink, you can just upload any subject instantly. So it would be like the
Matrix. You want to fly a helicopter? No problem...if you wanted to do
whatever, any given skill, you would just upload it instantly. The way
education works right now it’s extremely low bandwidth. It’s extremely slow.
Lectures are the worst.
Earth, Mars
Ma: I admire that you want to go on to Mars. I am more
interested in Earth.
Musk: The thing about Mars is that I think it’s important for us
to take the set of actions that are most likely to continue consciousness into
the future...I think we should not take 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’ve not found any aliens? There are people out there who think we have found
aliens. Trust me, we have not. I would know...One of those actions is to become
a multi-planet species or ensure that life is multi-planetary. 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.
Ma: It’s great to send people to Mars but we have to care about
7.4 billion people on Earth. We need heroes like you. But we need more heroes
like us working hard on Earth improving things every day.
Musk: I’m very pro-Earth. (But an effort to go beyond) seems
like a wise investment for the future.
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