 Welcome to WTDC 17 here in Buenos Aires in Argentina. I'm very pleased to be in the studio today by Tanmay Bakshi, who describes himself as an algorithmist, is that right? Yes, glad to be here, thank you. Thanks for being with us in the studio, Tanmay. Now I'd like to basically just ask you really what you're doing here. Obviously the majority of people here are as old as the hills, a bit like me. So I just wanted to find out what's brought you here to Buenos Aires. Sure, so I mean as you know I'm here for this great conference, WTDC originally actually the way I actually got here was one of the organizers, Jurislav, and I'd like to say a big thank you to him for inviting me. He saw my TEDx and SNATTY talk a few months ago that I had few months ago. So it was really interesting, he contacted me on LinkedIn and I was really fascinated by this amazing conference and I was really really interested in how I can spread my message about artificial intelligence and the technologies that I'm working with. So I immediately said yes and I've been working ever since to be in Buenos Aires and I'm glad to be here now. Okay, well let's talk a little bit about your message. What is your message about the technology and AI? Sure, definitely. Now my message is mainly about artificial intelligence and how it's not only the future of technology, but of the digital economy itself. And so I really like to emphasize how artificial intelligence can impact our everyday lives and in fact is already impacting our everyday lives. If you think about it even right now, if you would even record a video with like the iPhone 8 or 10 or really whatever, if you were to use a personal assistant, if you were to drive in a smart car, you're using artificial intelligence on almost a daily basis. Every single part of your life is powered by AI. And so how can we make it so that more people adopt to these technologies and be more open to it? Because I know there are lots of concerns regarding AI, the data it collects, what it's doing, but really my message is to adopt to this technology and it can really bring us a lot of benefit to our society today and really help augment these new organizations within the digital economy. Now apart from obviously your great knowledge about this industry, you actually developed an app? So I actually released my very first app when I was nine years old in 2013 called T-Tables, helps you learn your multiplication tables. After that I immediately started giving lots of different stem talks because of course at the time I was really really interested in technology in general on how science, technology, engineering and math can actually come together to create such a powerful combination. So I gave lots of stem talks at schools, et cetera. And then from there though, I mean sort of, I of course continued to work on iOS apps. I improved T-Tables. I created an application to set up your color blend. I created an application that helps you to actually lock important information and encrypt important information behind your fingerprint with Touch ID. But the thing is, and I even created a goal setting out for the youth called I Can We Can. But after that I sort of started to lose a little bit of my interest or you could say passion in technology. And the reason was because it was so rigid. Technology as a subject itself is something where the moment you code something in, you've got to start working on a new version. It immediately starts becoming obsolete. And I wanted to find a way to make technology new, make technology less literal. And so I started looking for new challenges. And luckily when I was 11 years old, I actually stumbled upon artificial intelligence. And the way I did that was by actually stumbling upon a documentary on IBM Watson on YouTube, which was really interesting and immediately fascinated me as to how a computer can play the Jeopardy game show. And so from there I was immediately hooked onto the concept of artificial intelligence. Immediately started working with Watson, created my first AI project, Ask Tanmay. And from there I've been really, really passionate about AI and what it can do for our lives. Now there are those who are quite skeptical about AI. What would you say to them? Sure. Now there are a few different ways we could talk about this question. We could say that people are afraid it's going to replace them in their jobs. There are some people that say artificial intelligence is bad for humanity. It's going to take over humans. It's going to kill us all or something of that. So some sort of end of the world scenario with AI. But what I'd say is, let's actually answer both of those questions. Number one, replacing humans. Now in terms of replacing humans, I'd say that artificial intelligence was not made to replace humans and is continuing to be developed for the sole purpose of really augmenting what we can do in amplifying our capabilities. For example, if you were to take a look into what AI is doing today, for example, in cancer treatment and diagnosis, we're not replacing the cancer specialists themselves. We're not replacing the oncologists. We're not replacing the doctors, the specialists. What we're doing is we're giving them this AI tool that allows them to diagnose faster and allows them to treat in a much more efficient and much more personalized way. Because the thing is, a human cannot memorize every single piece of literature on, say, cancer that comes out every day or has come out in the past, say, 10, 20, 30 years. That's impossible. But AI can memorize that and AI can actually understand that literature, can actually go into it and try and find meaning. Plus, what AI can also do is say we've got thousands upon thousands of different drugs. It can provide personalized medicine to individual patients. So instead of saying, you know, one drug fits all, we can do, for example, personalized medicine. In fact, in one instance, specialists fed in Parkinson's patients' information into Watson, and Watson gave out 16 medicines that were actually never linked to Parkinson's before in the first place. And then, of course, remember, not replacing the specialists come in, they actually take a look at those 16 medicines and they say, okay, which ones will help out this patient? But apart from that, what about these sort of end-of-the-world scenarios? Some people think that, you know, AI, we'd program it to do one thing, we'd program it to, you know, help us drive in a smart car, and the next thing, you know, it's taking over humans, it's taking over humanity. But I'd say, again, impossible. Reason is, AI cannot change its objective function, which is the function that tells AI you're doing good or you're doing bad. It's impossible for AI to make a decision on what it wants to do. The end goal for AI is always the same. And while a human could make the end goal of AI something negative, that's already being done with technology, and we're combating against it. But the positives that AI brings to us are so, so great. And the fact that it cannot change its own intent on what it wants to do makes me believe that it's completely safer really everyone to incorporate in their workflow and in their life. Now, you're not necessarily ahead of your time, you're certainly ahead of a lot of your peers. I wanted to ask you, what message do you have for your peers when it comes to use and access of technology? Sure, definitely. Now, I mean, of course, everyone in the world is using technology. Everyone in the world is, quite literally every moment of their lives using technology. Even as you're watching this video, you're using technology to watch this video. Whether it be your homework, even when you're learning something that's not related to technology at all, you're using technology to learn about it. But really what I believe is that in the future, and I completely agree with Mark Anderson's quote here, in the future there are only going to be two types of jobs in the first place. Those in which people tell computers what to do and those in which people are told what to do by computers. And so I really believe that everyone nowadays needs to be on the other end of the spectrum. They need to be telling computers what to do. And in order to be there, you need to future-proof yourself by actually learning how to speak the language of this technology, how to program. And from there, not just program, get ready for the future and get ready for what's already around you, artificial intelligence, which I believe is definitely the dominant part of technology itself and is only going to be going exponentially. So again, really trying to learn more about this technology, learn how you can speak its language, learn how exactly you can actually get into this technology and tell it what to do instead of the other way around. In fact, in order to do this, around six years ago I actually started my YouTube channel, TanmayTeaches, which is, again, one of the things that I did after I created my first application. And so with this channel I really love to share my knowledge about lots of different topics including computing, programming, algorithms, math, science, watts and all this sort of stuff. And so on that YouTube channel, really whenever I'd release a video, that day I'd be getting tens of messages on LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, email, everywhere saying, how can I code this in? I'm experiencing this error with my program. And so I realized there's a huge knowledge gap in terms of technology and the resources to actually learn about this technology, which is why I actually created a goal, which is that I definitely want to reach out to at least 100,000 aspiring beginners to help them really learn and innovate along their journey of coding. And of course I'm really glad to say that I'm already around 5,000 people there and I'm working towards it through lots of different media. Like, of course, as I mentioned, my YouTube channel, the book that I authored, and I started authoring, The Days Swift came out. It's called Hello, Swift, iOS app programming for kids and other beginners available for pre-order online. And of course many, many other media like the keynotes and interviews that I'm doing right now as well. That's great. Well, let's hope that we get some of that audience watching this video, which would be great. Thank you very much. I just wanted to ask you, from your perspective, what do you think will be the greatest benefit that artificial intelligence will bring? Sure. Now this is actually a very, very broad question. And so it's hard to answer in specific what the benefit is because the thing is AI impacts numerous different fields. Practically wherever you're using technology, that will be touched by AI in at least some way. And so what I'd say is, in general, the benefit that AI brings is decision-making and natural intelligence to computers. And like you might hear, you know, people say, you know, your computer has just this much processing power and it's so huge. Whereas your brain fits within a shoebox and has this much processing power, it's completely unfair in terms of a comparison. Because the way your brain is structured and the way a computer is structured is entirely different. The computer has no way of knowing it even exists. It's just a bunch of wires connected in a certain way to do specific math operations, which look as if it's doing something to us. But what I believe is that artificial intelligence sort of bridges that gap. It allows computers to make decisions as if they were intelligent and allows them to learn from previous data and to make decisions to actually predict future data points. And like, for example, with personalized medicine, we're not like, you know, humans taking thousands of drugs and individuals testing, okay, will this one help out a part of the situation? Will this one? AI is able to look at them and instantly and quite rapidly take a look at all the data points and is able to bridge that gap and take what computers are good at, which is massive data crunching and processing, and take what humans are good at, intelligence, and merge them together into this really fine piece that has a lot of advantages but a few drawbacks as well. For example, it's nowhere near natural intelligence. You cannot get to that with computers. However, what it does allow the computers to do is have enough reasoning to help us out so nicely that I'm sure within the next few years practically everything we do will be made much more efficient with AI. In fact, look right now, if I want to text message someone back and I'm on the other side of the room, I'm not replying to that person. All I do is I say, hey, Siri, reply to this person and say this, this, and this, and it sends it for me. Everything is being done so much more efficiently already within the next few years that will be really amplified and really allows to do practically everything we're already doing in a much more efficient and much better manner. You're certainly displaying a lot of natural intelligence. I wanted to ask you just finally, looking at the future, how do you see the future looking at AI? Sure. Now, artificial intelligence, if you were to think about it, the next level of technology grows at an extremely, extremely rapid pace. It's not like an estimate. You cannot put an estimate on that growth. It's something that's not predictable. But what I can say is that within the next 10 years, as I mentioned, we're already being impacted by AI and technology. Imagine the next 10 years when you get into your car, you won't need to drive that car. What that means is I'm not saying that we're just going to have self-driving cars. I'm saying that these mundane activities that humans have to complete right now, for example, in factories and driving your car, whatever it may be, these mundane activities are being taken away by AI. AI is doing that for us and we humans can concentrate and focus on innovating in other areas which require really the most, I believe. For example, AI, working towards making it even better, even smarter. So AI will take away these sorts of really repetitive small tasks that humans need to do that are not important to us and allow us to focus on other areas where that focus is required the most. That's what I've seen 10 years time and I can, again, definitely see our lives being so much better due to the fact that AI is here. Again, as I mentioned, we're not just allowing people's lives to be saved through cancer treatment. We're doing so, so much more than that. In fact, one example of that is actually a project of mine called The Cognitive Story. And with The Cognitive Story, we're trying to give Boo, a quadriplegic girl who lives just north of Toronto the ability to communicate through artificial intelligence. That's right, she actually cannot communicate naturally at all and only those most familiar with her condition like her mom can understand her very broad intent when she tries to convey something through very, very simple actions. And so through artificial intelligence, we have deep learning algorithms and understand her electroencephalogram brain waves and convert that to natural language and human speech. And so just imagine if we're able to give artificial communication ability to someone who can't communicate naturally, there's so much more we can do. It's practically limit less what we can do with AI and I can't wait to see what new algorithms bring us even closer to our goal in 10 years time. Let me back to the algorithm. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you very much. Glad to be here. Thank you.