2019 Review: August 26 - September 1
Happy start of September!
This week has had a whole host of successes and new discoveries that were either made or announced during these seven days. So strap and let's go through the major ones.
Starting with tradition, let's talk about ELon Musk. It perhaps caught your attention recently that Elon Musk and Jack Ma, co-founder of Alibaba, took the stage at the World AI Conference which was held in Shanghai. Their topic of discussion?
Artificial intelligence and what its rise would mean for the human race.
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Throughout the conference, Jack Ma remained adamant that artificial intelligence was not something to be afraid of, but rather that we should look brightly towards the new possibilities that it would bring. To quote the man: "I don't think artificial intelligence is something terrible, but human beings are smart enough to learn that."
VCG | Visual China Group | Getty Images
Elon Musk however, was - as one would expect - a lot more critical and impressed upon everything just how wary they should be of the computers becoming more intelligent than human beings. He explained the possible gap in intelligence by comparing it to the difference between humans and chimpanzees.
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"It’ll be much smarter than the smartest human. It’ll be like, can a chimpanzee really understand humans? Not really, you know. We just seem like strange aliens. They mostly just care about other chimpanzees. And this will be how it is more or less in relativity. In fact, if the difference is only that small, that would be amazing. Probably it's much, much greater. So like, the biggest mistake that I see artificial intelligence researchers making is assuming that they're intelligent. Yeah they're not, compared to AI."
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This lines up with the famous prediction that as artificial intelligence started to improve and evolve, it would eventually grow tired of waiting for slower humans to catch up to them. They would probably realize that they don't need to listen to humans, and would take over for themselves.
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Elon Musk provided a possible solution while plugging his company Neuralink, which aims to connect human brains with computers - sort of like having a built-in mobile phone. This could also help us stay closer to the level of AI, as we too would have a computer-like mind.
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The two then went on to talk about other topics like China's leading status in environmental sustainability and whether it would be possible to stop biological aging. It's safe to say that this was an interesting conversation.
And so, humanity moves another step closer to reaching Mars.
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On Tuesday, SpaceX's Starhopper spacecraft took its first flight. Starhopper is a prototype for the future Mars exploration vehicle. Pulling off another astounding feat of engineering, the spacecraft reached the targeted altitude of 150m (492 ft) for 57 seconds, demonstrating its capability to take off and land in whatever desired, controllable way the space-explorers wish.
