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Not much is known about Neuralink beyond Musk’s few public comments about the potential of brain-computer interfaces to accelerate human evolution. Musk sees real danger in artificial intelligence — he’s called AI a “fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization” — and believes that the best way to keep pace with machine intelligence is to upgrade human intelligence.

“Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence,” Musk told audience members at the World Government Conference in Dubai, proposing a high-bandwidth digital interface that can be interlaced with the brain to transmit data at the speed of thought.

Musk elaborated on the brain-computer interface — also known as a neural lace — in an interview published on the blog Wait But Why. In it, he said that the immense creative capacity of the human brain is constrained by the need to compress our highly complex thoughts into speech or typed text.

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Andrew Ng, one of the world’s best-known artificial-intelligence experts, is launching an online effort to create millions more AI experts across a range of industries. Ng, an early pioneer in online learning, hopes his new deep-learning course on Coursera will train people to use the most powerful idea to have emerged in AI in recent years.


Millions of people should master deep learning, says a leading AI researcher and educator.

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Artificial intelligence can’t understand meaning or emotion just yet, but it can write a pretty good essay on 17th-century maritime trade.

At the 2017 TED Conference this past April, AI expert Noriko Arai gave a talk presenting her Todai Robot, a machine that has been programmed to take the entrance exam to Japan’s most prestigious university, Tokyo University.

While Arai discovered Todai didn’t pass muster to gain acceptance, the robot still beat 80% of the students taking the exam, which consisted of seven sections, including math, English, science, and a 600-word essay writing portion.

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Jianxiong Xiao aims to make self-driving cars as widely accessible as computers are today. He’s the founder and CEO of AutoX, which recently demonstrated an autonomous car built not with expensive laser sensors but with ordinary webcams and some sophisticated computer-vision algorithms. Remarkably, the vehicle can navigate even at night and in bad weather.

AutoX hasn’t revealed details of its software, but Xiao is an expert at using deep learning, an AI technique that lets machines teach themselves to perform difficult tasks such as recognizing pedestrians from different angles and in different lighting.

Growing up without much money in Chaozhou, a city in eastern China, Xiao became mesmerized by books about computers—fantastic-sounding machines that could encode knowledge, logic, and reason. Without access to the real thing, he taught himself to touch-type on a keyboard drawn on paper.

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