The World Artificial Intelligence Conference 2018 kicked off yesterday in Shanghai, drawing top-tier AI scientists and entrepreneurs from China’s tech giants for discussions on AI’s latest technological frontiers and industrial applications. Synced is live at the West Bund Artistic Center in Shanghai to bring you highlights from selected Day 1 Keynotes:

Alibaba Founder and Chairman Jack Ma: Machines are not designed to mimic humans.

The steam engine freed humans from tedious labour, but it did not mimic humans. The car runs faster than a man, but it is not an imitation of a man’s legs. Computers in the future will unleash the full brain capacity of humans, but they will not think the same way as what humans do.

Machines must have their own ways of thinking. Having the machine completely imitate human beings, in my opinion, is not significant… What we should really worry about is not whether machine intelligence will outsmart human beings, but if human wisdom will stop growing.

Tencent Founder and CEO Pony Ma: AI is a skeleton key

Artificial intelligence is a cross-border, interdisciplinary scientific exploration project. No enterprise or country should isolate themselves from the outside and work behind closed doors.

The social impact of future AI needs to be fully considered. While AI today is still in its early stages of development, it will likely become a skeleton key in the future

Baidu Founder and CEO Robin Li: Four principles of AI ethics

A true AI company should be a three-dimensional entity that has an AI thinking, the capability to apply AI technologies, and also AI ethics. A company’s AI ethics must follow four important principles — be safe and controllable; promote more equal human access to technology; help humans learn and grow rather than replacing them; bring more freedom and possibility to mankind.

Director of Stanford AI Lab Fei-Fei Li: Ethical challenges

We should adhere to three principles of AI: First, AI must profoundly reflect human beings’ thinking. Second, we have a responsibility to guide and monitor the impact of AI on human development. Although engineering is our first challenge, we must pay more attention to the ethical challenges brought by AI. Third, AI should enhance humans’ skills instead of replacing labour. AI may replace people for dangerous work, but labour quality should continue to improve because of AI.

Founder and CEO of Xiaomi Jun Lei: AI as an essential strategy for Xiaomi

Human beings have entered the era of artificial intelligence, so Xiaomi naturally is incorporating AI as an essential strategy. Our company’s advantage is the massive amount of equipment and extensive data we have available for the practice, and our breakthroughs have been in the IoT sector. Xiaomi now has the world’s largest consumer level IoT platform. The role of AI as a consumer assistant is crucial.

Founder of SenseTime Xiao’ou Tang: No boundary between AI and traditional industries

There is no AI industry, but AI ”Plus”. Now, AI needs to cooperate with and add value to traditional industries. The value of AI is in helping improve efficiency and liberating productivity. There should be no boundary between artificial intelligence and traditional industries, AI will eventually benefit all sectors.

The development of artificial intelligence requires talents from all over the world. Global enterprises and institutions should strengthen connections and collaborations to remove barriers between nations in the field of AI.

Global Executive and Vice President of Microsoft Xiangyang Shen: Microsoft to set up Asia AI research branch in Shanghai

Microsoft is working with our partners to speed up global digital transformation through cloud computing and artificial intelligence. We are facing a wonderful opportunity because everything will change because of big data, cloud computing and AI. There are three major factors gearing up the development of AI. The first one is, of course, big data coming from the Internet and IoT. Also, it is unprecedented that cloud computing capability enables us to easily acquire and deal with information at a super large scale. Lastly, actuarial algorithms, for example, deep learning techniques, enable us to train computers and let them autonomously perform complex tasks.

Top AI Scientist and UC Berkeley Professor Michael Jordan: AI should be market and economy centric

Economics are systems that have intelligence. We’re thinking too much about creating artificial intelligence as an image of a human being, we should be thinking of creating artificial intelligence also in the model of a market, as markets create intelligence. But we don’t have enough of the spirit of this way of thinking embedded in artificial intelligence. Markets do these amazing things and if we put markets together with data we have a powerful one-two punch.

If we put learning systems together with market mechanisms we have something much more powerful, that can solve some of the problems we’ve been talking about today, including the loss of jobs.

Other Day 1 speakers included Indian-American Turing Award winner Raj Reddy, Tsinghua University’s Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, Landing.ai Founder and CEO Andrew Ng, and AI Specialist Pan Yunhe.

Synced will continue to cover the conference and update readers with the latest news.