Blind Survey: Elon Musk or Zuckerberg?

Results from an anonymous survey of experts on AI.

The Debate

Elon Musk has raised concerns about Artificial Intelligence in the past. He is quoted saying AI poses a “fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.”

Most recently at the the National Governors Association summer meeting, Musk said:

“I have exposure to the very cutting edge AI, and I think people should be really concerned about it.”

“I keep sounding the alarm bell, but until people see robots going down the street killing people, they don’t know how to react, because it seems so ethereal.”

-Elon Musk

Mark Zuckerberg took some questions on Facebook Live while bbq’ing in his backyard. At the 51 minute mark, someone asked: “What are your thoughts on AI and how it could affect the world?”

Zuckerberg took shots at Elon.

“And I think people who are naysayers and try to drum up these doomsday scenarios — I just, I don’t understand it. It’s really negative and in some ways I actually think it is pretty irresponsible.”

“If you are arguing again AI. You are arguing against safer cars… being able to better diagnose people. I just don’t see how in good continence people can do that.”

-Mark Zuckerberg

Marks comments comes just weeks after Elon’s statement to the nations governors’ on the dangers of AI.

So this happened.

Elon Musks response on Twitter

We thought it would be interesting to survey the tech community on Blind on who they supported.

The survey was posted on our Tech Lounge Channel, which is exclusive to verified users who currently work at the top 100 tech companies in the US.

The Results

700+ participants from top tier tech companies (Google, Facebook, Uber, Microsoft, Amazon, Tesla etc.) completed the survey.

Chart 1Who do you support Mark Zuckerberg? Or Elon Musk?

Results from Blind’s Anonymous Survey of Tech Lounge

Chart 2:Factoring in users who are experts in the field of Artificial Intelligence.

Results factoring in users who are experts in the field of AI on Blind.

Interestingly enough, the community at large is pretty evenly split with a slight favor (52% to 48%) with Musk’s end-of-humanity-as-we-know-it theory.

But if we pull results from just those users who are experts in AI technology, results lean clearly in favor of Mark Zuckerberg (60% to 40%).

Quotes from participants

Picked from users who filled out our optional comments section

“I work with Ai. In its current form, it’s not intelligent at all.”-employee at IBM Watson(voted in favor of Zuckerberg)

“General purpose Ai is as fictional as it was 100 years ago.”-employee at Google, works closely with Ai(voted in favor of Zuckerberg)

“Machine learning expert here. I understand the limitations of current Ai and with several major decade long breakthroughs, we will not get to the doomsday scenarios.”-employee at Apple(voted in favor of Zuckerberg)

TeamBlind is the creator of Blind: An Anonymous Community App for the Workplace.

[email protected]

Written by:Alex Shin