AI is outsmarting human capabilities, says Elon Musk

What happens when two of the world’s most prominent tech personalities meet up and opine on AI, one of the hottest subjects in technology today?

Photo credit: Dan Taylor.

Alibaba’s Jack Ma and Tesla’s Elon Musk, who’s now actively looking into the possibility of multi-planetary living, discussed AI at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai yesterday.

“I hate to call AI as artificial intelligence, I call it ‘Alibaba Intelligence,’” Ma said at the start of the session, to which Musk agreed: “It might end up being true.”

Musk observed that, generally, people were underestimating the capability of AI. “They sort of think that AI means smart humans, but it’s actually much more than that,” he said. “A lot of AI researchers are making the mistake of assuming that they are smarter than AI, but actually AI is much smarter than the smartest human – vastly smarter.”

In such a situation where AI can outsmart people by a great deal, Musk felt that more companies should look into the creation and development of a high bandwidth interface to the human brain so as to increase our level of communication input as compared to AI.

For him, developing such an interface will be crucial for humans to keep up with the advances in AI. “Assuming a benign situation with AI, we will just be too slow […] A milisecond to a computer is an eternity, but to us it’s nothing.”

As an example, Musk referred to Neuralink, a company that he founded in 2016 to develop a data transmission system between people and computers.

The firm is developing brain-machine interfaces with a goal to eventually implant devices in paralyzed humans, allowing them to control phones or computers.

Its first big advance is flexible “threads,” which are less likely to damage the brain than the materials currently used in brain-machine interfaces, according to a white paper credited to Elon Musk and Neuralink that was made public in July.

The abstract notes that the system could include “as many as 3,072 electrodes per array distributed across 96 threads.” In the future, scientists from the company hope to use a laser beam to get through the skull, rather than drilling holes.

Meanwhile, Ma believes that AI poses no threat to humanity. “Computers may be clever, but human beings are much smarter,” Ma said. “We invented the computer – I’ve never seen a computer invent a human being.”

While insisting that he is “not a tech guy,” the ecommerce mogul added, “I think AI can help us understand humans better.”

Musk did not concur with this, labeling Ma’s statement as the “famous last words.” “The computer will just get impatient, if nothing else. It will be like talking to a tree.”