The Spark | Marios Savvides

Well, I think we live in exciting times, and I tend to see the positive of things that come through.

Uh, but one of the things that does puzzle me is how do you raise chil- what are we asking the schools to teach and to be nimble-minded enough in their thinking to understand some of the things you're working on and other people working on, at least the idea of it? What do they have to know? It used to be computer programming.

Is that still true?

Especially now in the age of ChatGPT, uh, Claude, Cursor, you've got all this AI systems that can write code for you, right? And they're doing a great job.

I mean, my, my engineers use it, my students use it to help them write code faster.

And I think it's great for somebody who's learned how to program because they know how to then do something faster and better.

I think it's gonna be a challenge to the next generation where they're not gonna learn programming.

They're just gonna be completely hooked and dependent on the systems to write code for them.

And I think they'll be able to do things faster than what we would, could do at their age.

But the problem is they can't think, they can't understand the code.

And, you know, these systems are good, and you, and they, you know, they demonstrate, "Oh, I can, you can build an app end to end." Yeah, but it's not perfect.

You know, these systems really work well when you can build modules.

You build a function, you build parts of your system, and you piece it together.

So you still need to know how to piece code together.

You need to understand code and make sure it, it flows together.

You architect it, and I think that's important.

So yes, programming is important.

I think we should, uh, students should know.

I think it's, it's not the only thing, and in fact- My thinking is, and, and as I'm, as I'm teaching, you know, s- undergrads and grad students in my class, I tell them one thing: "I'm not here to parrot you.

I'm not here to, you know, fire hose you with gigabytes of data.

I'm here to get you how to think." So when I teach them things, I put them into the shoes of the inventor.

How was this algorithm developed? How was a transformer developed? You know, how...

You have to make them think about how did the next thing was invented.

And th- that process of thinking is very important because w- what we end up happening a lot, unfortunately, students taking classes, they just, it's a memorization problem.

I just gotta memorize.