Nothing captures the tech crowd’s interest these days than a good old fashioned beef between the giants of the tech industry, who often tend to be billionaires as well. Tesla co-founder and CEO Elon Musk has long raised alarm over the dangers of artificial intelligence. He’s known for believing that AI might be a threat to the human race. Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t hold the same views and this seems to have led to an indirect exchange of words between the two tech billionaires.
Musk most recently said that the artificial intelligence technology represents a “fundamental risk to the existence of civilization.” He pointed out that while he keeps raising the alarm, people won’t really understand until they see robots “going down the street killing people,” and that they won’t know how to react them because it would seem so ethereal.
Zuckerberg was asked about his views on the matter last Sunday during a Facebook Live Q&A session. A viewer asked Zuckerberg that “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 it could affect the world?”
The Facebook CEO replied that he has pretty strong opinions about this, adding that it’s possible to build things around AI and that AI itself will get better in the years to come. I think people who are naysayers and try to drum up these doomsday scenarios are — I just, I don’t understand it. It’s really negative and in some ways I think it is pretty irresponsible,” he added.
Zuckerberg also predicted that over the next decade, AI is going to enable many improvements in the quality of our lives. He rounded up his answer by saying that he finds it questionable that some people are arguing for slowing down the process of building AI. ““If you’re arguing against AI you’re arguing against safer cars that aren’t going to have accidents,” he opined.
A write-up of Zuck’s remarks was then shared on Twitter and Musk was duly tagged. He pointed out that he has talked to Zuckerberg about this and that “his understanding of the subject is limited.”
This begs the question, who would you side with?
I've talked to Mark about this. His understanding of the subject is limited.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 25, 2017
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