Two tech behemoths, Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) CEO Elon Musk, seem to have divergent views upon the subject of Artificial Intelligence and its potential impacts on society in the future.
It all began when Musk commented in an interview that AI is an "existential risk for human civilization."
His rather negative outlook was counteracted by Zuckerberg's positive one he was asked about Musk's comment in a Facebook Live Broadcast: "I have pretty strong opinions on this," Zuckerberg said:
I'm really optimistic. I'm an optimistic person in general. I think you can build things and the world gets better. With AI especially, I'm really optimistic, and I think that people who are naysayers and try to drum up these doomsday scenarios ... I don't understand it. It's really negative, and in some ways, I actually think it's pretty irresponsible.
Zuckerberg didn't stop there. He made ethical arguments as well, attempting to play on AI's use for the greater good:
Whenever I hear people saying AI is going to hurt people in the future, I think: Yeah, technology can generally always be used for good and bad, and you need to be careful about how you build it, and you need to be careful about what you build and how it's going to be used. But people who are arguing for slowing down the process of building AI - I just find that really questionable. I have a hard time wrapping my head around that. If you're arguing against AI, then you're arguing against safer cars that aren't going to have accidents, and you're arguing against being able to better diagnose people when they're sick.
Musk, whose Tesla vehicles ironically also employ self-driving characteristics as well as autopilot features that cannot function without AI, responded with a fiery Tweet that read: "I've talked to Mark about this. His understanding of the subject is limited."
While the topic of AI in inexorably a controversial one, the very fact that the people who are supposed to be pioneering its assimilation into human society cannot agree reveals two things: one, we still don't understand even half of what is required to responsibly use AI in our daily lives. Two, the fact that they disagree implies that solid standards for use have yet to be set by the industry or its leaders.
Either way, Musk and Zuckerberg's small tiff is symbolic of a more important, overarching conversation that needs to be had: someone needed to kickstart dialogue regarding AI's potential use in the future. Speculation has been the name of the game for long enough. We need figureheads and leaders to set up productive discussion, and standards, for future use.