Ok so good morning everyone. I'll just get started.
My name is Shailesh and I give these talks almost every year so this is a very
deja-vu feeling for me. The only thing different this time is the stage is
slightly thinner. But great crowd. Great list of talks so far.
So, Daniel called me a couple of weeks ago and said, 'Why don't you give a
keynote again?' And I said, 'You know, I'm running out of things to say now.'
I've given four talks at different forums with The Fifth Elephant and I wasn't so
sure what I want to talk about. So, then one of these days I was talking to one of
my non-geek friends and he was very excited about what I do, so he said,
'What do you do?' and I, you know, it was on the phone and I started talking to him
about this, that and the other. And for about 45 minutes I was rambling
and this guy was very quiet. I didn't realise he wasn't a techie and I was
going on and on, and after 45 minutes I stopped and said,
'Are you still there? Are you listening?' And he said, 'Yeah, I'm listening.
Can you tell me what do you do again?' (audience laughs)
And then I realised, how do I summarise this in 2 words?
So then I told him, 'Hey, I'm building thinking machines.'
And that's when he said, 'Why didn't you say that before.
It was so easy to say that, right?' So that's how the title came by,
and obviously we're not building thinking machines but
what I'm going talk about is towards thinking machines, right?
So, we have a long way to go. So I added the word 'towards' later.
So what I'm gonna talk about is all over the place. I'm going to talk about
philosophy, science fiction. I'm going to talk about algorithms and
I'm going to talk about, you know, deep learning and how to think about things
beyond deep learning. Alright? And let me give you a perspective
and then we'll start. So I'll take questions at the end.
Start working this.
Alright, so, I ended my last year's talk on this quotation
So I thought I'll start on this quotation this time.
So I like this quotation because it puts a lot of things into perspective of
what we're doing, how our civilisation got here, and where we're headed.
So it says, "Our technology, our machines, is part of our humanity.
We created them to extend ourselves, and that is what is unique about human beings"
And if you look at chairs, and dogs, and animals, and cats
They don't create machines to extend themselves. They just have instincts
and they follow their instincts. Right, that's very unique
about human civilisation. We've created Taj Mahal, and space flights, and internet
And so we've come a very long way. So if you think about the tools, right?
The cavemen had tools and now we have a completely robotic assembly line
with no humans and you could turn the lights off and nothing will happen.
The car would get ???, right? We've gone from just on-road, bullock carts,
to massive amounts of transportation we can do now.
If you look at our ability to look further in the space, again, since Galileo,
we've made a lot of progress, ??? he's certainly a thousand years off our
Pluto fly by. So now we're able to send satellites into space.
If you look at the first computer we built and where we are today, right?
We have a huge data centre, and really, if you look at the whole thing in perspective
we have made an enormous amount of progress in the last so many centuries.
So if youlook just at the technical part, the IT kind of intelligent machines,
we're not talking about mixies? and other things, just look at what AI
and deep learning, this stuff, has produced. Today's machines can play chess.
And there's no human on the planet who can play chess better than the machine.
I want to take a pause and think about where we are.
There's no human on the planet who can play chess better than the machine.
There's no human on the planet who can play Jeopardy better than the machine.
And recently, Google came up with automatic cars, so the machine can
drive cars and record show, that this cars are better than humans under rider?
conditions. And they have much less accident rates, and all the accidents
happened because of other humans drivers. They're not because of cars.
And recently also saw how machines are able to create pictures, right, so this is
one of the things that deep learning is internally doing.
And now think about all this. Just think about where machines have gone today.
How many things they can do which are way beyond our imagination
that machines could have done. So obviously there's a lot they've done.
But can they do the following? We would want to stress their limits
So one of the holy grails of AI is to have a machine have a conversation with
a human being. We all know the Turing test and the repercussions of this will be huge
We could think about how we talk to the internet today. We carefully craft word
for word queries, right, and you know, we allow the internet to make mistakes
We craft queries again, and we take the suggestions or not
We talk to the internet like we're talking to a 3-year-old
Now in the daily needs of massive data computers, NLP? and all its deploying
staff, imagine how shameful it is to talk to a computer like a 3-year-old.
So it's got the capacity of thousands of people but it can't understand language.
So we need to change that. Now imagine beyond keywords what can happen
We can do question answering, but how do we do question answering today?
We've created Yahoo Answers. We've created Quora, where people can type questions
We do a match between the questions and the answers, and then
we again do retrieval. So not answering questions.
Now think about conversations. Conversation is an even more complex thing
If it works out, what are the repercussions? I don't want to study
physics from my physics teacher. I want to study from my ? or ?
We already know all the language and knowledge of these people.
Can we not have a persona or a person Feynman or Einstein,
and have a conversation with that person, right? So just imagine the future
of what will happen if we're just able to have conversations with the machines.
So there's a long way to go between keyword search and conversations.