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.