314 Human

Oren Golan is the software development manager at Amazon! He is keen to learn Chinese partly because he has a number of Chinese colleagues and he wants to be able to join in with their conversations! ShaoLan is very happy to oblige and in this episode, teaches the word for “humankind.” Inevitably, when talking about the human species, the big question is how the development of artificial intelligence will affect the human race in terms of our role, function in society and even the structure of our civilisation. Oren believes that AI could be like a new revolution on the same scale as the industrial or information revolutions, which leads ShaoLan and Oren to have a philosophical discussion about the future of “human beings” in the light of new technological innovations and how these may either enhance or destroy human civilization itself!

The way to say “human” in Chinese is 人類/人类. The first character, 人 means “person” and the second character 類/类 means “kind” or “type,” so 人類/人类 means “humankind.”