CONCERNS
Zuckerberg is not the only one who has a much rosier vision of the future.
Andrew Ng, co-founder of Coursera and former chief scientist at the Chinese company Baidu, tweeted on Tuesday: "Kudos Mark Zuckerberg for speaking out against AI fear mongering."
While the debate between Zuckerberg and Musk is ongoing, Ng shared his opinion as well. He told an audience at a Harvard Business Review event what AI's real societal challenge is.
"As an AI insider, having built and shipped a lot of AI products, I don't see a clear path for AI to surpass human-level intelligence," he said.
"I think that job displacement is a huge problem, and the one that I wish we could focus on, rather than be distracted by these science fiction-ish, dystopian elements," Ng said.
However, Musk is not the only tech billionaire who is sounding alarm bells over AI posing a threat to our safety and well-being.
Stephen Hawking, for example, has stated: "I think the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race."
Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, said that in the near future, robots doing more work will be positive, but he did express concern over the potential of AI in the long run.
"I am in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence," Gates said in a question-and-answer session on Reddit, an American social news aggregation and discussion website.
HUMANITY AND AI
"AI is the driving force of the fourth industrial revolution," Fei-Fei Li, a top AI expert and chief scientist of AI/ML (Google Cloud), told Xinhua in a recent exclusive interview.
She believed that all vertical industries have the potential to benefit from AI deployments, saying "AI can make life better."
"The risks are way over-hyped and the benefits of AI are under-represented in the popular media," Tuomas Sandholm, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, told Xinhua earlier this year.
Sandholm and his Ph.D. student Noam Brown developed Libratus, a poker-playing AI computer program that in January beat a team of some of the best professional Heads-Up, No-Limit Texas Hold'em poker players.
No doubt, there will be lots of pressing problems for humanity to solve, which include AI amplifying racism and sexism, or the technology having the potential to put millions out of jobs.
"Technology can generally always be used for good and bad," Matt Kodama, vice president of Product at Recorded Future, told Xinhua on Thursday at the Black Hat conference. He thinks the most important factor is people, who are using the tools.
Li believed that humanity as a whole has the responsibility to use AI technologies to benefit mankind.
With more tools and technologies being developed, "we see how they could be used to benefit people or be used in pretty bad ways and cause big problems," Li said.
"It's not only responsibilities for developers or discoverers. I think all these people should be engaged: Silicon Valley leaders, professors, students, policymakers, lawmakers, educators ... everybody should be at the table discussing this," she told Xinhua.
In the Chinese language, the abbreviation of artificial intelligence, or AI, is pronounced the same as the character for "love."
"The ultimate power, in my opinion, is love, not AI," Li said.
