Artificial intelligence does not exist, says 15-year-old IBM programmer

Naina Mishra

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, December 5

“Next generation technology is huge and the world really needs more developers. Technology is going to grow exponentially in future," said 15-year-old prodigy Tanmay Bakshi, the world's youngest software developer and coder at Chandigarh University today. 

“Marc Andreessen (Developer of Mosaic) once said that there will only two types of jobs - people who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do. To be on the other end of the spectrum, we need to learn their language in the first place,”added self-taught machine learning (alternatively known as artificial intelligence) expert. 

A Canadian of Indian origin, who is also the world's youngest IBM Watson programmer, was in the city to deliver a talk on 'Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)".

His love for coding started at the age of five, when he used to see his father programming all day. His penchant towards technology drove him to create an IOS application at the age of nine, publish a book, and host TEDx talks at IBM Watson summits.

“My passion is to explore technology, more specifically machine learning technology. We use machine every single day. I want to make it accessible to more and more people across the globe, especially in the field of education and healthcare,” he said.

He pressed on using 'machine learning algorithms' for processing the unstructured data generated by humans. 

Bakshi is also a creator of the world's first natural language question answering application to be powered by IBM Watson 'AskTanmay'.

Exact AI does not exist

By ruling out the possibility of the AI overpowering humans, Bakshi maintained that: "Exact AI does not exist, while machine learning is futuristic and is meant to augment you."

“AI is hard to define. Simply put, it is simulating full human intelligence. AI is nothing. It simply does not exist. And thus, AI cannot replace us. It is machine learning that we misinterpret as AI. True AI would be exactly like us. It can replace human, but that technology does not exist," Bakshi told The Tribune.

Gender bias issues in AI can be tackled

 Gender and cultural bias in AI is most talked about issue today. In many cases, it still cannot identify pronouns and has a bias towards the male. "The way machine learning works is that it inherits our bias. Machine learning only understands in patterns. We have to find a way for it to differentiate between regular bias that should learn and human bias that we don't want. One way to do it is by scrubbing the data clean of any bias," said Bakshi while explaining the concept.

AI can weed out fake news, track depression

“Facebook is using machine learning algorithms to understand content to analyse fake news or hate messages. It will analyse the caption or audio in the video, stopping the news before getting viral,”said Bakshi.

AI can help track depression

"In the healthcare sector, AI can track depression at a much earlier age, diagnose hearing disorders and help researchers perform clinical trials in a professional way," said Bakshi.

'Project cognitive' for artificial communication

Bakshi is working on a project called "The cognitive story," that can help people, who have lost the ability to communicate naturally through artificial means.

He is working on a 29-year-old woman "Boo", who lost the ability to speak at a young age. A cognitive tech will augment her ability to communicate with the outside world. "I will use cognitive computing and artificial intelligence technology to decode EEG brain waves in order to comprehend what she is saying," said Bakshi. Besides, he is also working in agricultural projects that will help determine how much nutrient a plant needs.