In Germany my friends spoke very good English, but there were still times they'd sound like the drunken ramblings of a native speaker.
Only later on I'd realize the points they were trying to make and that they were running rings around me intellectually, just having trouble expressing it.
That experience has left me more or less giving a free pass to ESL speakers saying things that sound dumb, especially when it's off the cuff.
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.
If I thought this was at all a language or communication issue I’d never have posted it.
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.
Oh neat, a pun which works both in Japanese and Chinese.
Why do Chinese want their jobs to be automated?
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...
I agree the points he was making were vapid, and I stopped watching fairly quickly because of it.
Maybe he really is an idiot, but I don't think this video was at all conclusive proof.
That said, I agree that Jack Ma is far from as technical as Elon Musk, and still consider his spin-off of Alipay (Ant) from Alibaba to be very questionable from a corporate governance standpoint.
Language barrier is real and I am guessing some English speakers may never understand/empathize with the non-native speakers.
[1] https://money.cnn.com/2018/09/09/technology/business/jack-ma...
For what it's worth this matches my own limited experience from the early 2000s.
Relevant from other comment:
> 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.
He said it himself: If he doesn't want to do something or it is too difficult for him, he just delegates it, gesturing with his hand like a monarch would do. So the core of your statement is very likely true.
All say the company was actually much better run when Ma was managing company day to day, than when after Tsai took over operations, and himself just hired tons of "pro managers" to hand over errands.
At around this time (2012-2013), Tsai decided to show how much of a serious tech exec he was..., and he came with idea to do what big boy do, and rewrite all of Alibaba's core code into one True Enterprise Grade Java MegaFramework of Doom.
And it was at that time when their website quality started to fall off a cliff, and they started loosing talented people who were off-put by Tsai's management...
I'd say Aliexpress was much better at the time of it launch, than it is now. Alibaba, and 1688 had an even more dramatic loss of quality, and vendor oversight.
P.S. People talk about party affiliation of Ma from him joining the part to be allowed to teach in eighties, while forgetting that Tsai does not even hide his affiliation with the United Front (an organisation for CPC's version of "useful idiots,)" and is a much more outspoken political player, and party appologist.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/27/alibabas-jack-ma-has-been-co...
Absolutely. Political affiliations speak to the philosophy of the CEO and, by proxy, how they'll lead their company. E.g. Palantir is behaving exactly as expected given Peter Thiel's politics.
So it’s not everyone but it’s a lot. The actual CCP membership itself is much lower though. It’s more like an octopus in their society.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Age-Ambition-Chasing-Fortune-Truth/dp...
Even without language barrier, I think most of it is just the nature of politics and holding positions of power. It's not like many of us have a very good understanding of the inner workings of the higher cadres in the (D) and (R) parties, or of the leadership teams / boardrooms of large companies either.
As mentioned in the article, the CEOs of the other tech giants Tencent and Baidu are not members. It's simply not a huge deal one way or the other.
Not only that, but there isn't even a singular party of democrats or repulicans. Every state has its own party for each.
People can decide which party they are in and the party itself has no say in the matter.