China's Internet giant Baidu has launched on April 1 a plan to set up a consulting team that included science fiction writers in its research on artificial intelligence (AI), China Daily reported.
The report said that the Baidu Verne Plan is expected to bring together the world's best science fiction writers and leading scientists with the aim to help turn imagination into reality.
According to Baidu, they have already invited six people to be the first group of advisers in the team for the project named after the 19th-century French novelist Jules Verne, adding that some of Verne's ideas, such as helicopters, had been realized in the 20th century.
Some of the science fiction writers included in the team of five advisers are Liu Cixin, the first Asian author to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel last year for his book "The Three-Body Problem," and David Brin, an award-winning author from the United States. Andrew Ng, Baidu's chief scientist, is also one of the advisers.
The company will send advisers updated information on how certain technologies are being developed by the company, and the advisers will communicate with Baidu's research and development team to turn some of the ideas into products through brainstorming, Baidu said in a statement.
"This is an innovative organization. Many ideas, along with innovative work, will be born here," Liu Cixin told The Paper in an interview. "The project will focus on artificial intelligence, and there will be an opportunity for us to work with scientists once the project is officially launched."
Baidu's project is highly exclusive and open only by invitation.
President Zhang Yaqin believes artificial intelligence as the foundation that would empower traditional industries and make them smart, in which the company has aligned its visions.
"Baidu has made some world-class achievements in the key subfields of artificial intelligence, such as image recognition, voice recognition, machine translation and self-driving cars," Zhang told China Daily.
Many other Chinese companies view artificial intelligence as the next "big thing," especially after the recent defeat of a South Korean world-class Go player by Google's AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence program.
Humans are likely to be replaced by computers in a number of areas, industry insiders said.
Jimu.com, an Internet finance company based in Beijing, said that they are planning to launch a service that would use robots to offer wealth management advice to middle-class clients.
"Through deep learning, it is possible that the machines will be able to calculate investment risk, predict investment yield and offer tailor-made financial advice to individuals after analyzing a huge pool of data," according to Dong Jun, the company's chief executive officer.