Marty brought the meeting to order
Visiting Rotarians:
- Paul Yeadon - Silicon Valley Passport Club
Guests of Rotarians:
- Lydia Rosen
- Cristall Hernandez
- Russel Couch - future member
Erika Buck provided a poem for inspiration:
When things go wrong, as they sometimes will,When the road you’re trudging seems all uphill,
When the funds are low and the debts are high,
And you want to smile, but you have to sigh,
When care is pressing you down a bit,
Rest, if you must, but don’t you quit.
Life is queer with its twists and turns,
As every one of us sometimes learns,
And many a failure turns about,
When he might have won had he stuck it out;
Don’t give up though the pace seems slow-
You may succeed with another blow.
Often the goal is nearer than,
It seems to a faint and faltering man,
Often the struggler has given up,
When he might have captured the victor’s cup,
And he learned too late when the night slipped down,
How close he was to the golden crown.
Success is failure turned inside out-
The silver tint of the clouds of doubt,
And you never can tell how close you are,
It may be near when it seems so far,
So stick to the fight when you’re hardest hit-
It’s when things seem worst that you must not quit
First Thursday hours – We may extend hours to try and get more attendees. Please send comments to Gae La Torre.
Uplift family services Please contact Gae La Torre for Cristal Hernandez who runs a store providing clothing for needy families. They are requesting donations of towels, blankets, linens, dishes, utensils, clothing (men, women, children), toys (gently used).
Rebuilding Together October 19th.
World Polio day October 24th A few new cases have been found in the Philippines recently, so we must keep up this important work!
Great Race The date for the great race is April 19th 2020. Please make sure that you are available to help out with this fun event.
Next week‘s speaker is Michael Lella who wrote"Beneath a Scarlet Sky" the story of Pino Lella a teenager who led dozen of Jews to safety across THE ALPS IN WWI.
Our speaker this week was John Markoff, a pulitzer prize winning journalist and author. He has been a fellow at Stanford University Center for advanced study. He was a star reporter for the New York Times and wrote more than 3700 articles. He also delivered newspapers to Larry Page's house and Steve Job's house – the very people who have changed the way media is consumed more than anyone else.
His talk was about the formation of the computer industry and the emergence (or lack of emergence) of AI. Before going further we must be careful to use John’s definition of AI (otherwise the references to AI will be confusing) – that is a general form of intelligence similar to how humans learn, and can learn new things on their own. John talked about the limitations of current AI, and how we are currently in a slow period with respect to technology (partly due to current microchip limits which we have hit and that we are stuck w.r.t to AI software). In addition to this he mentioned that he had a very meaningful conversation with an economist (Daniel Kahneman a Nobel prize winner) who reframed many of the challenges that we are facing in terms of our aging population. He said that the problem we need to be solving is not the self driving car so much as how can we get a robot to give an aging human a shower, because the world population is aging so rapidly that we will run out of caregivers in the future. Part of this is due to the 1 child policy in China where they will face much more extreme shortages of caregivers due to this. He finally touched on the issue of ethics in AI. Indeed there has been a large shift to focus on this in the last 5 years where most people in the field are taking this very seriously.
"We can be humble and live a good life with the aid of the machines or we can be arrogant and die". Norbert Wiener