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.