Jack Ma, the billionaire founder of Chinese retail giant Alibaba, has warned on the increasing use of Artifical Intelligence, saying it is likely to cause “more pain than happiness” in the long run.
Speaking at an entrepreneur conference in China, he said that “machines should only do what humans cannot”, adding that there is a real chance that jobs of normal citizens will be lost on a wide scale. Replacing humans’ jobs with robots runs the risk of creating social conflict, which will “have an impact on all sorts of industries and walks of life”.
The speech marked an unusually pessimistic presentation from Ma, who frequently talks about the benefits of advancements in the tech industry. However, the warning came alongside acknowledgement that machines will be irreplaceable in the future.
He argued that business leaders who don’t understand that cloud computing and artificial intelligence are important for business should encourage young people in their companies to explain it to them.
Artificial intelligence has increasingly entered the mainstream of late, with Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri becoming standard on many devices.