Ma Zhaoyuan's name has several titles before it - chief researcher of tsinghua university's future laboratory, director of the digital advanced manufacturing research center, and tenured professor of intelligent manufacturing at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom.
Ma Zhaoyuan was born in a small mountain village in the Taihang Mountains.
At the age of 17, he was admitted to peking university with a bachelor's degree in nuclear physics through the National Physics Olympiad.
At the age of 25, he received his PhD in physics from Oxford University under the tutelage of Sir Keith Burnett, "father of the ultracold atom" and a fellow of the Royal Academy of Sciences. He then began postdoctoral research at the National Bureau of Standards and the University of California, Berkeley, under the tutelage of Professor William Phillips, the "father of laser cooling" and Nobel Laureate in Physics.
In 2009, 30-year-old Ma Zhaoyuan returned to China to join the Chinese Academy of Sciences and designed the world's first space cold atom experimental platform for the Chinese space station "Tiangong-4".
Six years later, he unexpectedly resigned. He said that as a practitioner, he wanted to understand China's physical industry from the front line.
At the beginning of 2022, Ma Zhaoyuan published a new book, "IntelligentLy Creating China".
What is Intelligent Manufacturing China about?
The book "Intelligent Manufacturing China" describes the problems faced by post-industrial society, analyzes the case of the AMRC model in detail, and explains how the whole mechanism works.
What is AMRC? Ma Zhaoyuan told reporters: "AMRC (Advanced Manufacturing Research Center) is an industrial research institute at the University of Sheffield. The AMRC model is simply that the university provides R&D services to industrial enterprises through strong industrial technology delivery capabilities, and eventually attracts a large number of industrial enterprises to invest in the surrounding factories. The research center also trains local young people for these industrial enterprises, who change their destiny by learning industrial technology here.
Because of the opening of the AMRC model, the engineering and research income of the University of Sheffield has surpassed that of the University of Cambridge and Imperial College, ranking first in the UK. A series of high-end manufacturing companies, such as Boeing and McLaren, chose to buy land and set up factories around AMRC, and the employment rate around the research center increased from 4% to 86%. ”
Ma Zhaoyuan told reporters that in the 1980s, Sheffield in the United Kingdom was a very typical rust belt city, once known for the steel industry, and stainless steel was born here. At that time, the area was in trouble, factories were closed, and employment was reduced. But in recent years, the UK, through the University of Sheffield, has transformed a city from a rust belt area into a city where high-end manufacturing is concentrated, and this has only taken more than a decade to achieve. In this practical process, the university plays a very important role, the university uses its scientific research capabilities to do research and development services for local enterprises. Because of its strong engineering solution capabilities, Boeing built the first factory in Europe next to the University of Sheffield, and the factories of large international brands such as aircraft engine companies Rolls-Royce and McLaren moved to the University of Sheffield. Their suppliers followed suit, turning the city upside down over the past decade or so.
He revealed that he is now building such a platform in Shenzhen.
"I do experimental physics, physics is experimental science, we have to make our own samples. Be sure to get started yourself, and making things is the most valuable. We are communicating with Shenzhen to promote cooperation between southern university of science and technology and central enterprises, and the government, universities and enterprises are working together to build such a platform and make a model. ”
Ma Zhaoyuan
Where are people better than artificial intelligence?
As a university professor, why focus on this work?
Ma Zhaoyuan said that social transformation itself is something that university professors should do. Now, he spends 80 percent of his energy on manufacturing and another 20 percent on artificial intelligence, "and I'm more concerned about what humans do that are competitive with machines in 20 years." The title of my last book was "AI-NOT, The Inability of Artificial Intelligence", and from a mathematical point of view, I studied artificial intelligence, based on this kind of artificial intelligence based on Turing machines, what can not be done. This is a very serious mathematical problem, and only if it is mathematically proved that AI cannot do this, we feel at ease, not ethically discussed. In the future, where do we want to draw the boundary between human mental structure and machine? This can affect our education in the future, and you don't want to teach kids the skills today, when they grow up, to find that machines do better than they do. So, today we have to figure out what skills we should teach our children, they have lifelong superiority, human lifelong superiority. What I hope to do is to prove mathematically that this lifelong superiority exists. ”
In Ma Zhaoyuan's view, what are the lifelong advantages of humans and machines? He replied: "There are some important jobs, such as our ability to learn. Some elements of learning ability can be distilled into mathematical problems, and then we can prove that these mathematical problems cannot be done by Turing machines. Because no matter how we talk about artificial intelligence today, all artificial intelligence is still based on Turing machines, Turing machines are the prototype of all our computers now, and any computer can degenerate into a Turing machine. What the Turing machine itself can't do, artificial intelligence can't do. In fact, some recent discoveries prove that, for example, the ability to learn is something that a Turing machine cannot accomplish. So if you maintain the ability to learn, you can do things that machines can't do. The same logic can be deduced, for example, how we define creativity, define people's communication ability, similar problems can gradually be mathematicalized, and then prove that these mathematical problems themselves can not be done by Turing machines. This is a scientific issue that I am more concerned about. ”
Red Star News reporter Chen Mou photo courtesy of the interviewee Editing By Jiang Qing
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