Salman Khan is the smartest man in the world
The world is changing. At some point in the future, says Ray Kurzweil, computers will be more intelligent than humans. He thinks it will happen in the year 2045 to be exact. That’s a scary thought, but he could be right. Many say he is the smartest man in the world.
But today I realized that Salman Khan is ahead of him. Khanacademy is an online tutorial for everything including math, biology, economics, chemistry, physics, history, and more. And Khan made all videos himself.
But not only did he do that, he is expanding at an exponential rate, to offer his courses to classrooms. And that could revolutionize education.
And all of that… for free, because he is filthy rich anyway, and doesn’t care about making more.
World changing: Khanacademy. See for yourself.
You can flip 1s and 0s all day long but learning without a conscience or spark of inspiration is not in-telligence. This is like trying to teach a rock to roll over on command, then praising it for disobedience. The stubborn rock won’t learn anything.
Yes, that’s what most people in this era believe. Nobody has proof that computers can be creative, have a spark, come up with new stuff. Everything computers say and do is always put down as ‘following instructions’. However, we are at the beginning of a new era, and it’s moving fast. Nobody says babies can never learn to speak, just because no baby ever spoke. We see the learning already in computers, it just doesn’t get very far right now. You will be surprised soon, and the discussion will start again. People are hard to impress when they keep thinking “it’s just a machine”. In the year 2020 it will not be so easy to tell if you have a computer or a human on the phone. Never mind your help desk operator is not creative, or doesn’t love you, you just won’t be able to tell the difference, and probably you’ll never know that the conversation you just had was with a computer.