I imagine a future where robots are so integrated in the fabric of human life that they become as common as smartphones are today. The field of robotics has the potential to greatly improve the quality of our lives at work, at home, and at play.
I can picture a world—not too far off—where it’s as easy to program a robot to deliver groceries or take a driverless car for a spin as it is to use a smartphone today. A personal machine tutor will help every child learn. Access to individualized treatment will revolutionize healthcare. And our smart cities will be free of traffic jams.
Coding AI is the New Literacy
Dear friends,
Today we take it for granted that many people know how to read and write. Someday, I hope, it will be just as common that people know how to write code.
Several hundred years ago, society didn’t view language literacy as a necessary skill. A small number of people learned to read and write, and everyone else let them do the reading and writing. It took centuries for literacy to spread, and now society is far richer for it.
Words enable deep human-to-human communication. Code is the deepest form of human-to-machine communication. As machines become more central to daily life, that communication becomes ever more important.
Traditional software engineering — writing programs that explicitly tell a computer sequences of steps to execute — has been the main path to code literacy. But AI, machine learning, and data science offer a new paradigm in which computers extract knowledge from data. This technology offers another pathway to coding — one that strikes me as even more promising.
Many Sundays, I buy a slice of pizza from my neighborhood pizza parlor. The gentleman behind the counter may have little reason to learn how to build software applications (beyond personal growth and the pleasure of gaining a new skill).
But AI and data science have great value even for a pizza maker. A linear regression model might enable him to better estimate demand so he could optimize the restaurant’s staffing and supply chain. He could better predict sales of Hawaiian pizza — my favorite! — so he could make more Hawaiian pies in advance and reduce the amount of time customers had to wait for them.
Uses of AI and data science can be found in almost any situation that produces data, and I believe that a wide variety of professions will find more uses for custom AI applications and data-derived insights than for traditional software engineering. This makes literacy in AI-oriented coding even more valuable than traditional skills. It could enable countless individuals to harness data to make their lives richer.
I hope the promise of building basic AI applications, even more than that of building basic traditional applications, encourages more people to learn how to code. If society embraces this new form of literacy as it has the ability to read and write, we will all benefit.
Keep learning!
吴恩达 (Andrew Ng)
机器人被誉为“制造业皇冠顶端的明珠”,其研发、制造、应用是衡量一个国家科技创新和高端制造业水平的重要标志。当前,机器人产业蓬勃发展,正极大改变着人类生产和生活方式,为经济社会发展注入强劲动能。
十四五机器人产业发展规划
人形机器人集成人工智能、高端制造、新材料等先进技术,有望成为继计算机、智能手机、新能源汽车后的颠覆性产品,将深刻变革人类生产生活方式,重塑全球产业发展格局。当前,人形机器人技术加速演进,已成为科技竞争的新高地、未来产业的新赛道、经济发展的新引擎,发展潜力大、应用前景广。
随着信息化、工业化不断融合,以机器人科技为代表的智能产业蓬勃兴起,成为现时代科技创新的一个重要标志。中国将机器人和智能制造纳入了国家科技创新的优先重点领域。