One EPIC AI Panel With Kai-Fu Lee, Andrew Ng, and Sebastian Thrun.

The most brain power on one stage in a very long time!

Left to Right: Kai-Fu Lee, Andrew Ng, Sebastian Thrun. Moderator: John Markoff

Three legends of Artificial Intelligence took the stage this week at an Sinovation Ventures event and it was a treat for the packed house of founder and investors. Here are their backgrounds as a refresher.

Kai-Fu Lee: developed the world’s first speech recognition system, CEO of Google China, founder of Sinovation. Andrew Ng: founded the Google Brain project to advance deep learning, founder of Coursera, Chief Scientist of Baidu. Sebastian Thrun: led the Google self-driving car project, founder of Udacity, CEO of Kitty Hawk (you know, that flying car startup).

Q: Are we living in an age of truly exponential change?

Kai-Fu: There is currently a bubble in valuation being too high, but it’s temporary. AlphaGo kicked off the bubble in China and it will hit China in 6–12 months, but AI advancement will continue.

Andrew: I think thanks to deep learning, we will see a generation of technology that will transform industries.

Sebastian: Humanity is about 40,000 years old. AI is 60 years old. The last year seems to have been the most exciting. So it does seem exponential. Right now, 75% of us work in offices and let’s face it, most of us do repetitive works. AI will do to the office workers what the steam engine did to manual labor workers.

Q: Impact of AI on jobs?

Andrew: Technologists see leading indicators. While a lot of jobs are still here, the replacement will come and we need to be prepared. We really need Coursera and Udacity.

This is just the beginning of human creativity. — Sebastian Thrun

Sebastian: I can’t wait for all these stupid jobs to go away. All of a sudden we will have free time to create. This is just the beginning of human creativity.

Kai-Fu: We are trying to remove the boring jobs and give people exciting jobs. Traders on wall street, call center assistants are going to be completely gone. Maybe productivity is the wrong way to look at the world. How do you measure a poet’s productivity. We want people to do things that are fun. Maybe we need a new metric.

Sebastian: The history of technology is IA — intelligence augmentation. AI will augment human intelligence.

Andrew: What is the concept of an AI company? Stanford Shopping Center making a website doesn’t make it an Internet company. Just because a company uses AI, doesn’t make it an AI company. We are in the early stages of how to organize our companies to truly take advantage of AI.

Q: Impact of AI on an aging population?

Andrew: Entrepreneurs are not looking at how AI may impact an aging population and they should.

Kai-Fu: I have many aging people in my family, but I think they want a human touch, not a robot to give them a shower. Elderly care should be done by people who are displaced by machines in other sectors.

Q: What is the competitive state of AI in China vs US?

Kai-Fu: China has a “1,000 person project” which helps people come back from overseas by giving them incentives. Top academics are leaving school to go into industry. The brain drain from top American universities is an issue.

Andrew: Both countries have great AI teams. Teams in China move very quickly and their ability to take products to market is incredible. China is homogenous which allows products to go from zero to billions faster. The pace is incredible in China. The basic research capacity in the US is great so each country has their advantages.

ST: I think brain drain is positive actually. There are many academic field like art research where there is no brain drain. I’d rather have Andrew do Google Brain than to write 10 more papers. We are in AI escape velocity. I’d rather put money in a corporation than an university. We have a phase shift in AI results based on Google’s scale. I don’t think universities are actually doing basic research. Why don’t we do research on curing all cancers? Nuclear fusion? Doubling the human life span? Flying cars?

Q: When are self driving cars coming?

Sebastian: Coming in 1 year. When I left the self driving car group at Google, self driving cars were already better than human drivers.

Kai-Fu: US has the technical lead, but the Chinese government is more likely to do the things needed to make autonomous cars safer. It’s 50/50 whether US or China will have it on a broad scale first.

Q: Will AI lead to great inequality?

Sebastian: I think minimum wage is an answer. Creating more AI should create more wealth so we just need to figure out how to distribute it.

Andrew: Digital education will give people more opportunities. Coursera usage is intense in developing economies. I prefer conditional basic income — basic payment is conditional upon people studying and improving. This gives them an incentive to study and to reinvent themselves.

Kai-Fu: We should do conditional basic income with one more condition — if they are willing to volunteer. The story is different in emerging economies. The size of population and rate of growth in developing countries is becoming a liability — they may need China or US to subsidize them.

Q: What’s the progress on autonomous movement in robots?

Sebastian: I think robotics will get really advanced soon. You have to aim high. Larry Page recruited me to Google to do self-driving cars. At first I told him it was impossible. He asked me what’s the technical reason why we can’t do self driving cars in 2007. I didn’t have an answer when he phrased it that way and we eventually did it at Google. You can figure things out if you aim high.

Andrew: You can’t aim to too high. Find something that you can have line of sight on that can make an impact.

Sebastian: I disagree. Aim higher.

The panelists had some friendly banter at this point and throughout.

Q: Is the endgame brain computer interfaces (think Neuralink)?

Sebastian: Our brains are very slow. The only way to go is to have a direct interface. Having something like Neuralink is going to be amazing.

Andrew: Our limit is we can’t process information. The bottleneck isn’t just input and output of information, it’s just the human brain is quite slow.

I believe we have to protect our humanity — our faith, soul, spirit. — Kai-Fu Lee

Kai-Fu: I believe we have to protect our humanity — our faith, soul, spirit. If you think everything can be completely replicated by machine…then there is no meaning of life. The alternative to that is to do the engineering but at the same time keep true to our humanity.