Opinion Ma vs Musk on the supremacy of machines over mankind

It was a rambling discussion in Shanghai last week that brought Artificial Intelligence into focus once again. In this case, it was the clearly jet-lagged Elon Musk, a technology legend and disruptor, and a very composed Jack Ma, the largest purveyor of goods over the internet. While the discussion rambled all over, from Pong to The Matrix to Mars, it was Musk shooting down Ma's optimism by saying that these could be "famous last words", that caught my attention. Musk has been consistently pessimistic about AI. In another famous joust, this time with Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, he tweeted that "his (Zuckerberg's) understanding of the subject is pretty limited".