Taiwan Will Train 10,000 AI Workers Per Year For Google, Microsoft And More

With Trump splitting the world between China tech and Western tech, it could be a good idea (although not a politically good one) to split the eggs between US tech companies and China tech companies.

First doubt you can ā€˜cultivateā€™ like this. More buzz word stuff.
Second they may not stay here if any good.
But itā€™s better than no plan!

What they should do is offer scholarships to the SEA students to come here and do MSc PhDs and then work for a few years. They are already getting quite a few I believe but can ramp up further and offer friendlier environment to them.

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Maybe AI is a good angle for Taiwan? Broadly speaking they are good at hardware, not so strong in software. Building chips and drivers, good, building UX/design/human friendly systems, not so much. AI is something where they can deploy their surplus technical talent, without buggering up design/user experience for whatever software they are building. They can ā€˜hideā€™ in AI.

Of course the real reason why most of these offshore tech companies are here is skills/labour for their NT dollar is a good comparing to home. The rest is PR BS. And American tech corporations are the masters of BS.

As a side note, it is interesting they want to begin educating Taiwanese at elementary school, in what is by my estimation a pseudo science.

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They suddenly realised there is a CHEAP pool of tech talent here AND itā€™s outside of the trade war. Itā€™s a no brainer really.

Taiwan can fill the gap for SEA bright students, their countries donā€™t have a strong electronics industry so they need to come to places like Taiwan to plug into the global industry . Itā€™s very attractive for them to get studies funded and work with IT giants (going by some interviews I read) . In Taiwan they can work with Acer, Asus, all kinds of semiconductor, telecom and peripheral related companies. And hopefully Google And MS and Facebook too.

These kind of very bright people donā€™t grow on trees and any educational program canā€™t necessarily create one . Better to import from SEAā€¦Right now!

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You need to have people with ā€˜intelligenceā€™ before they can start on AI.

Ooooh low blow :sunglasses:

My idea of how to implement the scheme is way better than their usual ill thought out bollocks thrown together by some civil servants.

Why? I wouldnā€™t understand a thing about how it works.

The low intelligence slanderā€¦:laughing:

Iā€™ve been holding off on that one. Knew someone would post it for me. But yeah, Iā€™ve got mold in my fridge with more intelligence than some people Iā€™ve worked with here.

Common sense could be a quality in low abundance.

Isnā€™t AI meant to replace ā€˜workersā€™ in the future? AI will write itā€™s own code!

Yes and no. A popular analogy is that when ATM first came out, bank tellers were scared that they would all lose their jobs. However, instead of having less workers at the banks, they now have more because instead of doing paper work, the tellers instead became more productive by promoting investment options.

You would definitely be replaced if you canā€™t adapt to doing new and more productive things, but at the same time, people are freed from doing menial tasks, and get to create more value instead.

Also, Universal Income, or rather AI tax should probably be applied so that people donā€™t suffer too much during the transition.

Bank tellers have almost all lost their jobs in the West.

Even ATMs are going extinct . :open_mouth:

Taiwan is still kind of weird like that.

This is so obviously the best way forward for Taiwan. Taiwan should double down on scholarships and naturalization for SEA talents and invest heavily in AI and robotics to minimize the need for low wage workers.

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Agreed, the SEA students should fill a near-term gap for tech talents to accelerate the Taiwan govtā€™s tech road map. But in the long run, they should either have a strategy to convert these talents to citizens (social issues aside) or build up local talents or both. Singapore did these successfully in the past 25 years, but of late, had to reduce overseas scholarship offers to avoid social perception issues.

When I read the title I imagined Google cultivating artificially-intelligent workers in vats.

Itā€™s only a matter of time.

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Maybe not yet, but Googleā€™s Director of Engineering Kurzweil did predict this (ā€œtechnological singularityā€) could happen by 2045.

Did the article actually mention these 10000 workers are humans? Maybe this whole discussion is void.

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Kurzweil is the greatest self promoter ever.

The idea of the singularity goes back to the great sci-fi writers Isaac Assimov, Robert Heinlein and Arthur C Clarke in the 1960s i.e.computers that would evolve and create more intelligent computers ad infinitum. In fact Asimov wrote about the super intelligent (The Brain) computer in 1945.

Those guys predicted artificial intelligence, various forms of the internet, working or studying from home, satellite communications, all that jazz. They didnā€™t predict Facebook ā€¦although Ray Bradbury kinda did.

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Smart enough to keep their refrigerators in order.