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> It’s what he was saying — not how You also need to take into account to whom he was saying it. Although they were ostensibly talking to each other, Musk was
by yorwba 6y ago
> It’s what he was saying — not how
You also need to take into account to whom he was saying it. Although they were ostensibly talking to each other, Musk was speaking to the fears of Americans afraid their jobs might get automated, while Ma was addressing Chinese who hope their jobs will get automated.
Consequently, their definition of "smart" is not the same. Musk equates smartness with being good at your job, while Ma thinks it's better to be "street smart" and let someone else do the work for you. Or in the car vs. human example, why try to outrun it if you could be sitting in the driver's seat?
> Then he states that human intelligence comes from the soul anyways.
I thought that was a clever riff on Musk's somewhat awkward "AI means love in Chinese, right?" conversation starter.
> To be fair, Jack Ma was an English teacher, has a Bachelor of Arts in English from Hangzhou Teachers University and he was an English lecturer at Hangzhou Dianzi University. While he may have an accent his communication style is quite clear IMO.
I don't know whether you've ever experienced a foreign-language class taught by a non-native speaker, but I've taken Academic Writing classes in English at a top Chinese university and the quality was terrible. English literacy is rare in China even though it is a mandatory subject, so the bar to becoming a teacher is quite low. Often, they'll have an excellent breadth of vocabulary, while being unfamiliar with many idiomatic expressions and cultural references that come naturally to a native speaker.
That said, I did think he was communicating quite clearly, but since my understanding appears to be quite different from yours, maybe that's just a reflection of our different expectations.
On the other hand, if the event was specifically organized so that they could speak past each other and endear themselves to their respective audiences, it was a genius move.
- Danieru 6y ago> "AI means love in Chinese, right?" conversation starter. Oh neat, a pun which works both in Japanese and Chinese.
- SkyMarshal 6y ago>while Ma was addressing Chinese who hope their jobs will get automated. Why do Chinese want their jobs to be automated?
- yorwba 6y agoFor the same reason that a farmer wants a tractor and a seamstress wants a sewing machine. Controlling the machines that do the work is less exhausting and higher-status than doing the work yourself. Of course not all Chinese think like that, but an optimist view of future technology seems much more prevalent in Chinese-language media than in the English-speaking world. Maybe that's because China is still at a relatively low level of industrial automation and trying to catch up to advanced manufacturing economies like Japan or Germany with their "Made in China 2025" initiative. And the overall optimism doesn't mean there aren't also critical voices, worried that instead it will be the machines controlling the humans who do the work. E.g. Renwu recently published an article about delivery drivers struggling to meet the deadlines set by the system, which you can read translated into English by Jeffrey Ding here: https://chinai.substack.com/p/chinai-111-algorithms-and-food-delivery https://chinai.substack.com/p/chinai-111-algorithms-and-food...
- arcticbull 6y agoThis is something that confuses me about Americans. Why on earth wouldn't everyone want their job automated? The only thing we should be discussing is how you fairly distribute the proceeds in a world where humans don't need to work.
- ls612 6y agoBecause from a realpolitik/game theory perspective if your existence doesn’t contribute any sort of value to others/society there’s little incentive for others/society to keep you around. And that always ends in a very ugly way.
- arcticbull 6y agoThere is a built-in self-limiting mechanism for this. As development level increases (and coincidentally the number of workers required decreases) so does human fertility. Birth rate in the US is 1.77, well below the replacement rate of 2.1; Canada is 1.5, Finland is 1.49, Japan is 1.43. The workers are disappearing peacefully already.
- 6y ago