Musk or Ma? Clever or smart?

Dong Jun / SHINE

Alibaba's billionaire founder Jack Ma is fully confident that humans would create useful tools in the future while Tesla CEO Elon Musk is pessimistic. 

Musk took examples such as the chess computer DeepBlue, Alpha Go and Alpha Zero when asked by Ma to name objects or things human beings have made that are smarter than human beings. 

"(One of the) most important mistakes I see people making is assuming they're smart," the Tesla founder said while meeting Ma in Shanghai during the WAIC. 

He said it was pointless to play chess with a machine, like "fighting Zeus." 

"Computes are already much smarter than humans in so many dimensions," he said. "There will be a smaller and smaller corner that humans are still better than computers." 

But Ma countered by saying that a computer maybe clever but a human being is much smarter.

"Clever is very academic and knowledge driven while smart is experience driven, and the computer after all is invented and created by human."

Ma said he's confident that "when human beings understand ourselves better, we can improve the world.”

He also added that the computer is only one of the clever tools that humans have created and more tools will be on the way.  

Humans created cars and it's stupid to compete with a car to see which one runs faster, Ma said, adding that unlike some people who are very sad that computers are surpassing human chess players, he thinks "we should do things we're good at" instead of competing and comparing ourselves to computers.  

The two, however, agreed over population concerns, both saying that population collapse may bring big problems in the next 10 or 20 years. 

"Even though with 1.4 billion population, the speed of population decrease could quickly pick up in the future," Ma said.