It’s no lie that Elon Musk has warned the likes of Facebook and Google about fiddling with AI. He doesn’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing, but he believes it needs to be controlled and monitored. Zuckerberg, however, believes AI is here to advance and assist human kind.
The above clash of opinion has launched a public debate between the two allowing Musk to say that Zuckerberg’s knowledge is “limited” and Zuckerberg to retaliate by saying that people who talk about AI being destructive are “pretty irresponsible”.
The foundation for this nerdy debate started with Musk, early in July when he pushed for more proactive regulation of artificial intelligence. Musk believes AI poses a “fundamental risk to the existence of civilization”. Musk also said, “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”.
Musk has also stated in the past that AI will be top of the food chain and make us somewhat their slaves or we will face the next Skynet.
Here’s where Zuckerberg comes in, who disagrees with Musk’s dystopian vision. He made his comments while hosting Facebook live video stream from his home. One viewer asked: “I watched a recent interview with Elon Musk and his largest fear for the future was AI. What are your thoughts on AI and how could it affect the world?”
This led Zuckerberg to a very candid response of “I have pretty strong opinions on this. I am 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.”
Zuckerberg believes in a utopian version of AI and will save lives through driverless cars. “One of the top causes of death for people is car accidents, still, and if you can eliminate that with AI, that is going to be just a dramatic improvement,” he said.
However, recently Facebook shut down 2 of their AI robots as they created their own language and started to communicate with each other. Facebook did state that it wasn’t out of fear but rather because the robots were not performing what they were created for (which is to talk to people, not robots).
Musk’s rebuttal to these comments was a tweet stating that Zuckerberg’s knowledge of AI is limited.
Either way, AI is either going to breed killer robots or a safer world for civilization, only time will tell.
