Balaji Vishwanathan's guest lecture in a nutshell

                                   

“I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think” - Socrates

He entered without a prepared presentation or any agenda like the others to ‘teach’ us. He radiated an intellectual charm combined with humility and a comfortable approachability.

A man had casually walked in on the stage without airs or any sign of descending from the sun. A humble erudite persona, dressed simply in a white shirt, denim jeans and a black jacket with the chest pocket reading ‘Quora Top Writer 2013’. Balaji Vishwanathan graced the lecture hall of LNM Institute of Information Technology which was overflowing with inquisitive excited young minds, with his remarkable presence.

                                      

Peeking out from behind him was Mitra, a stark white, straight out of the sci-fi movie, nuts and bolts holding the swinging arms and legs, a horizontal cylinder for a face with square eyes, button nose and a well-defined mouth. Mitra is a humanoid robot targeted for improving customer interaction. It has the ability to recognize speech, detect faces and engage in conversations.

Mr. Vishwanathan is the VP of products at Invento, a company which runs IoT/Robotics themed makerspaces. Mitra, their flagship product is an attempt to bring the advent of the era of commercial robots in the market. His star status on Quora, a question-and-answer site, as the most followed user, is no less a feat altogether. His knowledge spreads far and wide in the fields of Indian history, politics, ethnicities, finance, economics, religion, education, and technology to name a few.

He started with the example of Jarvis, a recently developed AI (artificial intelligence) for home automation by Mark Zuckerberg who had released a fun summary video of this home assistant incorporating AI systems of speech recognition, face recognition and language processing to ease his day to day task of turning off the lights or singing lullaby to his daughter etc. Google home and the Amazon Echo are the other players in the market who have ventured into the arena of controlling smart homes with easy voice commands. These products throw light on the emerging niche market of AI and its seamless integration in our life by making it easier.

He emphasized on the scarcity of companies dealing with manufacturing and selling of commercial robots specializing in face and voice recognition, with the only one being in Japan, other than Invento Tech. On the shape and features of  Mitra, he claimed that generally people are not comfortable with something without arms and legs but going to the extremity of exhibiting human similarity by giving it a human face also creeps them out. He carried on by explaining the target audience of his product and the need of having commercial robots in workspace and houses by giving the example of old age home caring facilities.

After this brief introduction of the topic of his intended talk about the AI technologies and its awaited boom, he opened the floor for questions. He was inclined towards having an informal interaction with the students responding to their individual queries on any topic under the sun. The questions soon started pouring to which he answered wholeheartedly displaying his expertise, commendable coherence and apparent clarity of thoughts on all the subjects.

                                   

First, he mentioned the evident flaws in our obsolete education system and how the prevalent ideologies and practices have been the dregs of the early religious preaching and customs carried on up till now. Pointing to the 2ft pedestal he stood on to deliver the lecture, he drew the parallelisms between how in early times the ‘Guru’ was given the stature of God and that was the origin of a teacher standing on a higher level than student while imparting knowledge.

He focused on education being ‘free’ not as in free beer but as ‘freedom’. The freedom to choose from the plethora of existing fields in the world which the child inherits an interest in. Also, why stick to it for the rest of your life when you are capable of learning any new technology or a skill that grabs your attention. Our education system catered to the requirements or prerequisites of the jobs in the industrial revolution era. The conventional formal education today as we know it prepared us for when we had to work all our lives in a single profession. However, in today's fast-paced world, we have the potential, the resources and the power to experiment and evolve in multiple domains, one after the other, many times. After 12 years of age, there remains no point of binding the kid’s imagination to the formal structured diluted information in the schools. They should be free to explore on their own into the realms of their unabated passion and unchartered territories.

"Formal education will make you a living. Self-education will make you a fortune." - Jim Rohn 

The major fallacy of our education institution remains that even after completing the formal school education and a prim and proper graduation degree, most of our youth falls in the category of ‘unemployable’ by major companies. This tragedy of modern times where a finished product of our institutionalized education is labeled as ‘incompetent’ in the real world and has outgrown his essential years of exploration of his talent. The wasted years in cramming useless facts could have been utilized by optimal exposure for the child to experiment. We need to draw inspiration from the parents of a 15-year-old who decided to take a year off after her 10^th board examinations to travel the world and try out new things. She had the most productive year ending with her growing love for coding in Python (not childish theoretical stuff but actual applications as seen in the industry), a finished book and a traveler’s heart. This should be the first step towards ensuring quality education of our new generation to revive India’s position in the world as the ‘Knowledge Superpower’.

A pivotal shift was now observed in the discussion as after education we proceeded to how Nationalism is a necessary evil. The compulsion of playing the ‘national anthem’ before every movie in each theater to instill “committed nationalism” is going way overboard with the whole idea of patriotism. Then why do we put up with it? He added a new dimension to our understanding by highlighting the otherwise overlooked concept of how the society gets readily divided into segments based on caste, languages etc. which form the root cause of the deadly riots and local feuds. All these differences are neglected when everybody comes together to stand united in the name of patriotism. The sweeping jingoism across the country, on the other hand, is dangerous and unacceptable.

The next question following this was what has been on the tip of the tongue of people for years now about how the digitization in industries and service sector will lead to unemployment on a large scale. His response described how England at the time of industrial revolution had nothing to lose and hence went ahead to embrace rather than fear India’s leading cotton industries in the world and eventually manipulating it to their own benefits. Similarly, India is in the spot where it has nothing to lose right now in terms of advancements of cutting edge technology. A quotation from the Brad Pitt movie Fight Club “It’s only after we have lost everything that we’re free to do anything” fits here perfectly. So now starting from scratch, we are at the best place to adopt latest inventions, welcome the era of digitalization with open arms and transform into a world’s superpower by 2050. 

We need to invest in our manufacturing sector by using high-tech robots to facilitate automation, provide better quality, efficiency and cheaper products. Nobody can yet predict the humongous opportunities the tectonic shift from the manual to the digital world would bring along. It will open the gateway to an entirely new stream of jobs nobody has imagined up till now.

The next query flipped over the lecture to the ‘fake news’ floating around and their massive influence on people, especially during the American elections. The negative repercussions of these fake websites, operated by some teenagers in Europe which had sprung up overnight, feeding the citizens tempered news and baseless facts, were observed worldwide.

The standards of traditional media have fallen steeply which created a vacuum with desperate need of trusted news sources. This is where these trashy websites stepped in. People have lost faith in the conventional media to report the news without any fabrication. The reporters instead of plainly reporting the actual incident smother us with their own judgments on the issue. The media’s reputation is in grave jeopardy today. The world has rapidly raced towards the age of Information warfare.

The final concluding theme was the necessity of the existence of a healthy competition. The importance of China and Pakistan as a constant external threat to strengthen our feeling of solidarity was discussed upon in detail. Had there been no China to race against, we wouldn’t have budged an inch. Without their nuclear warfare and diplomats, we wouldn’t have learned to play the games of global politics. The western countries today plunge their eyebrows in a frown over China’s growing GDP but had it ceased to exist then India would have been their target to focus their efforts to inhibit our growth. China proves to be a great opponent, one pushing us forward to a new zenith.

Who would we rather be playing with? A great opponent who teaches and challenges us to do better or a lame loser whom we beat without batting an eyelash and who fails to put up a good fight?

As a final note, he left us mesmerized with the painted picture of history repeating itself where India will once again be admiringly referred to as the ‘Golden Bird’ (‘Sone ki Chidiya’) on its rise to prosperity and glory and we would be the change-bearers of the new era.