Survival Strategies in the Era of AI Taught by Stanford | Stanford AIRE Director

If a job can be done by human and it cost $1,000. Because you can't really calculate faster than the machines. Then you let the robot do it.

It will just cost roughly around $200. AI will make a lot of jobs disappear in the future. How much more information kids get nowadays It's just completely different now We still use the same way to teach them.

And then the more I think about it, the more I feel like we need to push to change that. I'm Li Jiang. I'm the director of the Stanford AIRE program.

You know, the era of AI is in the near future. And I would say it's actually now it's started already. I'm passionate trying to figure out what is the right way of teaching the next generation in the era of AI and robotics.

We have a lot of people are afraid of AI, so they try to avoid this. They're like, Oh, I want to stay away from that. But the thing is that that's probably one of the most powerful tool that we have ever invented.

If you don't use these tools, then you cannot really compete with anyone like other people. I think there's a few things we need to change. One is that we need to start a teach AI Thinking as early as possible.

AI Thinking will allow them to know the difference between human and AI. And then the human part is really the innovation part from 0 to 1. That's where I cannot do a good job.

We need to focus on that. There's three important thing about AI Thinking With the first thing, you need to have general understanding of how AI works In the past, AI is basically mostly based on the rules or the specific algorithms that we write in the computer. The humans set the rules And then now, we developed a different algorithms like deep learning, reinforcement learning based on data, because we have much more powerful computers that can handle a way, more data, and then they will develop and trying to find the most optimized solution based on the current data.

And then the more data you have, the better solution you usually will get if you do the first one. The second one is that you will gain the ability to differentiate the human ability versus the machine's ability or AI's ability. I think probably most of the audience don't know.

There's a scientific research area called structural biology. Scientists in this field study the structure of a protein. Proteins are so important for all the living creatures.

The whole world have like 100 to 200 million proteins. This research area, like scientists, a lot of them are focusing on determining the structure of these proteins. We humans only find just a very little number of these proteins, like the structures of it less than 1%.

However, this AI is called AlphaFold. That's from DeepMind. In the past two years, AlphaFold predict like the structure of almost all the proteins in the world, and they put it in the open database online.

So a job, once the machines can do it, then let the machines do it, and then we focus on the human part after you get the first two. The third one is you will have the ability to work with AI And use AI to help you to accomplish other jobs. There is critical part is from 0 to 1, which basically that we invent something that doesn't exist before and we probably can do 0 to 1 better with AI providing a lot of information and things like that.

So we should prepare our kids to learn how to innovate, to generate new ideas, to use AI to help us, that kind of stuff. Creativity, It's a. .

it's something that is really hard to teach or some people think creativity cannot be taught how to teach people creativity. This thing get changed by the Stanford Design Thinking We can use this method to teach you how to systematically to make innovations. Design Thinking is a methodology that we use here at Stanford to teach people how to make innovations, and we do not make you as innovative or creative as Steve Jobs or Elon Musk However, we can use this methodology to make you more creative or innovative than yourself.

So design thinking has steps that you can follow. The first step is empathize. First, you have to understand who you're inventing for are you inventing for your parents or you're inventing for children who are studying in the school?

You have to understand who are the users. Then you empathize with them, especially their emotion. And then you go to the second step, which is called Define A lot of people, They didn't have the right problem to start with.

Then you have to define that problem clearly and then you go to the third step, which is ideation, which is using brainstorming to generate a lot of ideas, and then you kind and then you kind of get feedbacks from the users. You pick the good ones to prototype. After you do the prototype, which is the fourth step, you do test what the user and then you get feedback.

Maybe the feedback is good or maybe the feedback is bad, but you have to do redesign or reinvent. We have a phrase called all design is redesign. if you realize, Whoa, I actually didn't define this problem right, then you go back to the step two.

So you have to go in this iterations Eventually you will have some very nice inventions. But when you read books and or you listen to some lectures, whatever, after you finish in that you didn't understand it yet you have to use it several times to really feel it. Let me give you an example in one of the class at Stanford.

So basically this project is about how to get good incubators, get more incubators for Nepal At first that actually a lot of people are just trying to say, well, just design it in California. But then we say, Well, you have to gain empathy. You need to go to the the real place.

If you have never been to Nepal, how can you design for that? They actually fly to Nepal and they went to the mountains. And to their surprise, they actually see a lot of these expensive incubators in these medical centers.

They actually are not lack of those machines, but they don't know how to operate them. Problem is defined wrong. They have to redefine the problem.

And then they went back to these villages and talk with those farmers. We do need those things, but not in these medical centers. We need in our home.

We need the cheap ones. So then they actually design a very cheap, like kind of functioning as a baby incubator and had very good success. And that's a good example.

The problem was defined wrong at first, and then they go into This Design Thinking process and they find a way to redesign the problem and then they solve their right problem. The most interesting thing about AI & Robotics there is a few of them. I think the first one is ChatGPT, because it's probably a surprise for a lot of people that AI can talk with people in that very natural way.

And also it can not only chat with you, it can also write code for you. It seems like he knows a whole lot and it's smarter than a lot of people and which surprised people So and also it's going to change education for sure, because now kids can use chatGPT to write essays and do homework. So then teachers need to think about how to deal with that.

Actually, I just gave my student an assignment yesterday. I asked a student to write an essay. I said, Well, you know what?

We just talked about ChatGPT in the class. Now I'm going to give you an assignment to write an essay with the help of ChatGPT. I'm not really asking you to not use it.

I ask you to use it. And then after that class I will have short discussions with each of you and tell me how you use it. How do you feel it?

I think that technology advancement, you cannot trying to ignore it or trying to avoid it, it's happening and it's just like water. You cannot block it. You have to go with it.

For me, I want to understand how ChatGPT is going to impact our education system and I want to work with our students to understand that better. So that's why I gave this homework for my students I'm a big fan for Autobots, Transformers I grew up with those cartoons, and I'm a big fan of it Even now I'm still a big fan for Optimus Prime And that really inspired me that I always wanted to make cool robots when I was a little kid I think most kids, they have a dream when they're young. It's easier to inspire dream when someone's in the early ages after people grow up, they kind of lose their interest, they lose their dream, they don't know what to do.

It's actually critically important for these little minds to have dreams. My ultimate goal is to find out what is the ideal education system for the future. The education part is really important.

It has profound impact on the next generation's future, and that's my ultimate goal.