In another piece of news:
China to add AI courses in primary education
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15154289
Where does the US stand? Any serious plans by its leaders and the government?
China to add AI courses in primary education
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15154289
Where does the US stand? Any serious plans by its leaders and the government?
From my experience with my elementary && high school teacher, I can safely assume that they can't even program a complex stuff, let alone understand what AI is.
It could be really interesting to see my future son/daughter ask me something I'm also interested in and probably working on.
"Seven-year-old Chen Jiahao has a problem sum he can’t solve and he can’t wait to get home from school to pose the question to his all-knowing maths tutor.
His tutor is amazing, the boy says. Just snap a photograph of the question and the tutor will provide every possible approach to solve the problem, step by step – all in a split second.
Jiahao’s tutor is inside his mother’s smartphone. It is, in fact, an app that draws on artificial intelligence (AI) technology to solve challenging maths problems for primary school children.
And it’s just one of many AI-enabled apps Jiahao uses daily on his mother’s phone. When the boy started primary school in Beijing, his teachers recommended that his parents install the apps on their phones. The software give out school assignments, grade pupils’ work and even generate unique sets of exercises for each child based on their areas of weakness.
“Jiahao likes his AI teachers,” said his mother, Yu Ting, adding that her son spends at least two hours on the AI apps every day. “He greets my phone as eagerly as he greets me.”"
Inside the AI revolution that’s reshaping Chinese society http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2100427/china...
Interestingly, it seems Jiahao is not allowed to bring a smartphone to school for now. That could change in the future.
For more than half a century, the best and brightest minds in the world have come to America. Bret Stephens put it best:
>As for Nobelists, a report by George Mason’s Institute for Immigration Research found that Americans have won 40 percent of all Nobel Prizes ever awarded — and immigrants accounted for 35 percent of those winners. Last year, the only native-born American to win the prize was Bob Dylan, for literature. The rest of the American winners — economist Oliver Hart, physicist J. Michael Kosterlitz, chemist Fraser Stoddart — are immigrants.
>A common American conceit is that we attract brilliant foreigners because we have brilliant things: great universities, vast financial resources, a dynamic economy, high-tech. That gets things mostly backward. It’s because we have brilliant foreigners that we have those things in the first place. Google. Comcast. eBay. Kraft. Pfizer. AT&T. They all had immigrants as founders.
>Overall, a 2016 study by the Partnership for the New American Economy found that 40 percent of all Fortune 500 companies were founded or co-founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants. Taken together they employed 19 million people and had revenues of $4.8 trillion.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/opinion/daca-trump-dreame...
The United States will be the leader in all major technological advancements for the conceivable future, because there is more genius in the United States than there is in the rest of the world combined. There has never, in human history, been a nation so adept at attracting the best and brightest minds from the far reaches of the globe.
No other country comes close to possessing the capacity for invention and sheer brilliance that the US does.
There are more than 9 million Chinese who take Gaokao university entrance examination each year. Even if 1% choose to major in AI or a closely related field, that is 90,000 per annum. Among this mass, there will be some future inventors of breakthrough algorithms who could have chosen to major in physics or math without the policy.
Moreover, most of future AI workforce will focus on applying it to various domains rather than inventing whole new algorithms or frameworks. For that purpose, having more people is a clear advantage.
The US Government does not need to mandate student course on artificial intelligence. Just as they did not need to mandate courses on the transistor, micro-processor, dozens of programming languages, html, TCP/IP, or how to be a database admin.
Tensorflow (prev DistBelief) - which helped provide the spark for this AI boom - was not derived from a command & control method, a dictate handed down by Donald Trump & Co. or Obama's Administration. It's a hilariously laughable premise.
You can trace it directly by counting AI stories on HN. There's a before TF and an after TF. I don't think it's subtle, there was a huge acceleration at exactly that time forward.
I think when you look back at big explosions in tech, it's usually hard to argue it was just some miracle product that was 10x superior to everything else that was the reason (there's usually other competing products or technologies). Often it's a combination of factors that come together and result in the boom (timing, viral cult-like adoptive behavior, etc). Whether we're talking about the web browser (specifically Netscape), the iPhone / mobile Internet, electric car (Tesla), and dozens of other technologies that seem to have followed similar sudden big spikes after seeming to be comparatively stagnant for years or decades (eg solar). They hit that inflection point and off they go. I suspect Google's TF product (along with the other mentioned reasons) was near the sweet spot on timing, combined with a significantly easier to use product, when the GPU was simultaneously getting a lot cheaper and faster. It's likely that for the AI boom to occur, we had to hit a GPU inflection point before it could lift-off fully. Google, as a result of the nature of their business (they perhaps had more reason & resources - due to the nature of search etc - than anyone else to be doing something like TF at that specific time), was there with a product at the right time.
I don't mean to suggest that Google was the sole reason for the AI boom though. Rather, I think the GPU inflection basically guaranteed it was going to happen and Google was in a sweet position out of necessity for the benefit of their own search technology (to their credit they were pursuing this tech despite their money printing monopoly). That they opened up TF, was a big deal though. You can imagine a lot of giants of industry would never in a million years open up something that potentially valuable.
In my opinion the field is also developing so quickly right now that it seems too early to teach in school. By the time students graduation their knowledge would be outdated.