 We are at the ITU headquarters in Geneva where of course it's the first day of the AI for good global summit and I'm really pleased to be joined here now by Cynthia Brazil she is professor of media lab at MIT well Cynthia thanks very much for being here so why are you here and what are you actually part of in terms of the dialogue? Yeah so I am thrilled to be here this is the second event I've been at the United Nations event where the topic of AI has been discussed as a way of potentially accelerating how we can achieve the sustainable development goals and tell me what is it precisely because you work in education you're working social robots what does that fit into this discussion? Yeah I think you know one of the most poignant discussions today right now is how can incredible technologies like AI that we're seeing you know make huge advancements in many sectors truly benefit everyone truly did you know benefit the world versus just a few so from my own work I'm very passionate about education in particular and the application of AI to help accelerate education for all as part of sustainable development goals and literacy education in particular. And how does AI affect that? So you know in the area of education there's tremendous promise in terms of developing personalized highly effective measurable outcomes for people through AI so we're starting to see you know the development of computer tutors for people of all ages in various domains such as mathematics and so forth science we're starting to look at it for younger children around early literacy early childhood learning is a critical time to intervene but it's really the promise of scalable affordable personalized education that's accessible to everyone and a lot of that is around just harnessing the fact that mobile devices like Android phones are getting into many many developing countries so there is increasingly a way to reach children through technology the question is now what is the educational content and what is the underlying artificial intelligence to make the educational process as effective as it can be for children. Now what I've also worked on is social robots tell me about that. So social robots is a it's a branch of robotics and artificial intelligence that really looks at the question of how do you design intelligent machines that can work collaboratively in partnership with people. When people work with one another it's not just about the tasks and the decisions that are made there's also a lot of interpersonal social emotional factors to effective teamwork so it's really taking a shift from the kind of old paradigms of machines that are designed to replace people and really think about how do you now design intelligent machines that really augment and enhance and collaborate effectively with people to amplify human output. Finally so if we met up again in ten years from now what will you tell me have changed since today in ten years from now. I think a number of things will have changed I think in certain areas such as education because it can benefit from digitization and artificial intelligence I think we'll see much higher rates of education and literacy rates over all across the world in ten years. I think in the area of robotics and the workforce we can certainly expect to see a number of traditional markets and job characteristics change flexibly over time that's always the case of any sort of new impactful technology in the workforce but I believe AIs are going to play a critical role in the education retraining of the workforce as well. We are also seeing a global demographic shift towards global aging so we're seeing that caregiver support ratio get more challenging over time as fewer working age people are there to support a larger percentage of aging population. There again I think augmenting the workforce with AI technologies and robotics is going to be another important change we're going to see in the next ten years and decades looking forward. Okay thanks very much Cynthia. So that was Cynthia Brazil who's a professor at MIT in the Media Lab talking to us about social robots and the future for education.