© IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd
Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates recently hosted Khan Academy founder and CEO Sal Khan on the second episode of his new podcast ‘Unconfuse Me’ where they talked about how artificial intelligence will transform education.
For the unversed, Khan Academy is an American non-profit organisation founded in 2006 that aims to create a set of online tools that help educate students.
During the discussion, Gates asked Khan if he had one magic wish to master a subject without any studying, what would he choose. Khan said it would either be quantum physics or piano. Gates then said he was embarrassed that even though he knew all these computer languages and he took Latin and Greek, he didn’t know any “real languages other than English”. Gates said he would have chosen Chinese as helping the US and China get along is going to be pretty important.
Gates then asked him if he ever gets confused with Salman Khan because if you do a web search on Sal Khan you might get the actor’s photos as well. Gates also held up a portrait of the Bollywood actor. “I do. In fact, in the early days of Khan Academy, I got letters from some of his fans saying I’ve always been in love with you, and now I didn’t know you could do math and all that,” Khan said.
Khan then shared that when he went to India in 2015, he had a live discussion on a national television interview with Salman Khan just by virtue of having the same name. He also said he watches more Bollywood movies than folks suspect. His wife grew up in Pakistan, he said, and people suspect maybe she made him watch Bollywood movies but it was the other way round.
When Gates asked him if he watched them in English or Hindi, he said he understands Hindi even though his mother tongue is Bengali. Sal Khan, whose full name is Salman Amin Khan, was born on October 11, 1976, in Louisiana into a Bengali Muslim family.
