You should learn to program: Christian Genco at TEDxUTA

we begin our third and final session with a very dynamic student he's a president scholar at the lyle school of engineering at smu and his goal is to share with the world his love and his passion for computer science and more specifically computer programming please welcome the stage the very talented christian genco about a year ago reddit user cs-nl posted this question to the internet reddit my friends call me a scumbag because i automate my work when i was hired to do it manually am i csnl was hired to do manual data verification and validation on this gigantic excel table rows and rows of it very menial trivial tasks um the people in this department were very good at it there was an entire department just doing this they completed six to ten records a day with about 90 accuracy now csnl was very clever and he knew some basic computer programming so he wrote a computer script to literally do his entire job for him the script that he wrote completed over a thousand records with 99.7 accuracy in five minutes he replaced a department of people in a weekend of coding now i know you're thinking all right clever kid stupid management they should have just hired a computer scientist to do this job in the first place because this data manipulation stuff is what computers were designed to do but i want you to think for a moment about the place where you work and i want you to think about what it is that most people are doing there when they're working chances are it's just another form of data manipulation and it looks a lot like this and if your job doesn't already look like this it probably will soon this has already happened to architects and to doctors and even things that weren't even remotely related to computer science at first like painting or art in a lot of cases computers have completely replaced the person that was there in the first place did you know we used to hire people to stand in the middle of intersections to direct traffic for us i just found out the other day they're still doing this in north korea we used to hire people to print out yesterday's news on really thick stacks of paper and hand deliver it to our homes we used to have stores that would store analog copies of movies printed out on analog tape and they would charge you late fees if you didn't return them in time ridiculous um there's still a lot of things that we're doing in society that don't make sense in a world where we have computers like textbooks really heavy books that you can't search through it's not dynamically linked you can't get more information it's really hard to to find information in them or receipts um little scraps of paper that you need a lot and you need to be able to search through them but they're really hard to keep track of or classrooms why should i go to a classroom when i can watch a video on youtube or khan academy and i can fast forward through the boring parts or rewind through the parts that i didn't understand in the first place there's a lot of problems like this that if computer science were more ubiquitous society could solve them with much greater ease but what can you do about it well to answer this question i would like to travel back in time to the year 1961 the year that nasa scientists decided it would be a cool idea to send a man in a giant can from earth to the moon but we had a problem the amount of calculations you would have to do to coordinate this really complicated system of rockets was way too much to do by hand you just couldn't do it but nasa scientists were very smart they engineered one of the most advanced computers of its day the apollo guidance computer to do a lot of these calculations for them they did that with this how many people in this room have one of these who doesn't like one guy in the back your smartphone in your pocket right now has the computing power to do the calculations for one million apollo 11's simultaneously now i couldn't fit a million apollo 11s on this slide but if you can imagine this slide repeated this many times and then this slide repeated this many times that's how many apollo 11's your cell phone could do the calculations for not to mention this thing has a gyroscope and a temperature sensor and an hd camera this could replace half of the spaceship nasa scientists in 1961 would have fallen to their knees and worshipped you like a god for having this kind of technology and what are you using it to do there's a gap between the problems that we're facing in society and the immense power that you have at your disposal you can't harness it you could use them to solve the problems if you only knew what to do with it which is why i've come up with a clear call to action which is that you should learn to program now there's scientific research that says that if you repeat something you're much more likely to remember it so if on the count of three i could get everyone to say i should learn to program one two three i should learn to grow but why why should you do this thing that this guy on stage just told you to do um well i have three reasons why the first is that computer programming quite literally makes you smarter um why should i learn to program you're all probably asking yourself which is a very good question um there's already people that can program for me i can just hire them but that's probably also what people were saying in the 1400s about reading and now that you know how to read don't you think it's really useful can you imagine what society would be like if only the upper elite if only the clergy members were the people that could read and they would read to you and that was the only way that you were allowed to get information um reading and writing and math are these basic fundamental tools that extend what your mind would otherwise be capable of doing so that you can apply yourself to much bigger and broader tasks can anyone solve this division problem in their head it could be like three seconds no but if i gave you a pen and paper to do it a six-year-old could solve this in like a minute right pen and paper are these really good tools for externalizing what you would be thinking of and it's really the democratization it's spreading these tools around that's where you get this immense creativity when the electric motor was first invented in the factories they had this big steam-powered engine that was central to the thing and it was powering everything else with belts so when they first got the electric engine they just replaced the steam engine with the electric motor but the people in the factory it took a generation for them to realize wait a minute we have electric motors now we don't need one big central power source we can spread these around and we can have little individual ones and turn them on and off when we need to um it takes spreading this around it takes everyone to know it for these creative innovations to happen and computers are really really really good tools for extending what you would otherwise be capable of if a computer scientist has the problem of not wanting to go to the video store because they're really rude and they charge him late fees he can just make a website so he can stream video directly to his laptop if a computer scientist has the problem of not liking textbooks he can just make a website that has all of the information form linked to everything else and anyone can update it whenever they want if a computer scientist has the problem of thinking that it's really awkward to ask people if they're single he can just make a website that lists that for all of his friends um a common side effect of solving these kinds of problems is that sometimes you become a multi-billionaire but even if you don't even if you don't invent the next facebook learning the basics learning the fundamentals of programming gives you these really useful tools of thought like the process of breaking up a really big problem into really tiny incremental pieces to make it a lot easier to solve or the process of iterating over a problem really quickly to get working versions so you can tweak things and not be afraid of scrapping it and starting over or the process of social coding of open source of getting everyone from all different corners of life not separated by geography or time anymore to work on a project together or the process of finding a little tiny bug in a really complicated system being able to fit the entire thing in your head at once if nothing else learning a little bit of computer science will teach you enough to stop listening to what a talking paper clip is telling you to do and to start actually understanding how the computer is working i gave this talk in front of a bunch of middle schoolers that did not get this joke we're getting old um but ultimately you need to learn to program so that you can harness this incredible power that's at your fingertips which brings me to my second point which is the computers are getting better and faster and smarter faster than you are computers have been better than people at math for a really long time since the the very first abacus i guess um until very recently humans were able to beat computers at chess but since 1996 no human alive unassisted has been able to beat a computer at chess just last uh two years ago now uh in 2011 a computer the watson computer is now able to beat every single human in the world at jeopardy it was thought to be impossible um and this is just going to keep happening just recently computers can beat humans with a 100 success rate at rock paper scissors which it terrifies me um in the next few years it's going to be considered dangerous for a human to drive alone unassisted by a computer because computers will be such better drivers than us um and this is just gonna keep happening because of this thing it's this law in computer science called moore's law that states that every two years the average processing power of the average computer will double double every two years how much smarter does your brain get every two years now granted you're still much much smarter than a computer but for how much longer um the futurist ray kurzweil estimates that by 2025 we'll be able to buy a computer with the processing power of a human brain for a thousand dollars but even more amazing than that is what you can buy today right now the raspberry pi credit source credit card sized computer started shipping in the us about a month ago for 25 25 for a computer imagine the things you could do with this if you knew what to do with this 25 you could practically throw these things away 25 for a computer to harness every single innovation that we've ever had in this space of of computer science but you wouldn't know what to do with one if i gave it to you because this is what it looks like when you turn it on which brings me to my third and final point which is that you're lazy but what you don't realize is the computer programmers are some of the laziest people on the planet if there's a job that a computer scientist has to do that takes 10 seconds every day a computer scientist will spend months trying to build a tool for himself that will shave five seconds off of that 10 seconds um but when you're first learning how to program it's going to seem like the complete opposite it's going to seem like this is a total waste of time because you'll learn things like how to get the computer to do math for you and how to get the computer to type out words for you things that you could do much better and faster and simpler if you just did it yourself but if you can stick at it if you can program consistently for about an hour a day after about a month you'll be able to do a task faster by programming the solution to it then it would have been for you to do it manually and all of a sudden life will just become magical you'll be able to automate any task that you want repetitive tasks will seem trivial if you do it once you'll never have to do it again for as long as you have to do it um you'll be able to process vast amounts of data data that never would have you would have been able to fit in your head all at once but if you tell the computer to do it once you can say do it a hundred million times and then it just does it for you um you'll be able to process you'll be able to code up solutions to problems that have never existed before with no one telling you that you can't and you'll feel inspired to become a programmer don't i want you to go back to whatever it was that you were doing before you started to learn to program and bring back these tools bring back these things that you've learned from computer science to whatever it is that you're doing there's a lot of people in the world that know how to program but there's none that also know how to do what it is that you know how to do how do you get started well google for everything really um but for programming especially it's a great resource just google learn to code it's a huge space right now you need to get on board as soon as possible if you don't find anything that you like on there go to my website it's my name christianco.com i've compiled a list of my favorite resources i'd like to end right now with a quote by someone that totally would have been a programmer if computers had existed when he was alive henry ford once said if you have a difficult task to do give it to a lazy man and he will find an easier way to do it so be smart be lazy and learn to program thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 121,459

Keywords: Phones, Bryan Black, UT Arlington, Moving Forward, Fezalex, TEDx, tedx talks, Learn, EXCEL, ted talks, Arlington, ted x, ted talk, Programming, English, Multitasking, SMU, Computers, ted, United States of America, tedx, Dallas, tedx talk, Genco, Christian Genco, University of Texas At Arlington, TEDxUTA, Texas, United States Of America (Country), Program, Chips, Efficiency, Technology, Alex Villalobos

Id: cALAPK2ZSrw

Length: 12min 58sec (778 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 03 2014