The Fourth Revolution: How AI is Redefining Our Era

We are living through humanity’s fourth great industrial revolution. The steam engine mechanized our muscles. Electricity powered mass production. Computers connected our world. Now, artificial intelligence is transforming how we create, reason, and imagine—surpassing human capabilities in ways we once thought impossible. But how did we get here, and what does this mean for us as builders of technology? In this talk, we’ll take a journey from the age of hand-crafted algorithms to today’s generative models that produce stunning imagery, write code, and even create entire interactive visual worlds from just a text description. Focusing on the most recent breakthroughs in computer vision, we’ll uncover the surprisingly simple intuitions behind these systems—and reveal the unexpected blind spots that remain even in the most advanced AI. Through concrete, relatable examples, we’ll explore why these gaps persist and what they tell us about how these models truly operate. We’ll conclude by looking ahead: toward AI systems that combine vision, language and audio into rich, multi-modal "world models". These advances will not only transform software engineering but redefine how we build, collaborate, and interact with technology—and their story is still unfolding, with all of us helping to shape the next chapter.

Speakers