Shailesh Kumar - Towards “Thinking Machines”

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?