His childhood has gone as viral as the Internet allows. Always armed with an arm-stretch pose that feels more like a doff of the hat to Shah Rukh Khan, 14-year-old Raul John Aju already has a place of his own on the Internet. Instead of having an established techie superstar be the inaugural speaker at the ongoing Huddle Global 2024 conference in Kovalam, the honour went to the Class X student of Government Vocational Higher Secondary School.

It took Raul five seconds to introduce himself to t2… five seconds in which he packed in as many keywords as any popular online article would: He is a “techie”, a TEDx speaker, a “YouTuber” and “I guess an influencer”.

Raul was, in a way, born into the artificial intelligence (AI) generation and is many steps away from the “YouTube generation” and when he heard that I knew Unix and Cobol, it was more of a vacant “right…” that left his lips.

Raul John Aju delivers his session ‘Dream big, code bigger: Shaping the future with technology' at Huddle Global 2024

He is not afraid of AI, even though he knows there would be jobs lost at least in the short run. “Technology can be amazing. I am constantly asking myself ‘what’s next’ and that got me into AI, machine learning, crypto, blockchain and the metaverse. I share my passion on YouTube,” said Raul.

The “AI tech enthusiast” delivered an exciting session titled ‘Dream big, code bigger: Shaping the future with technology” at the startup tech event and he even took on a few questions from the audience, like how can AI be used in healthcare. He had answers for everything. No wonder when we caught up with his father, we were told to stay in touch with Raul directly because he can take on a few journalists.

“With tech or without it, I want to get my voice heard. Forget that I am an influencer and all that… I am also a student. It’s not difficult to have both. Sure, I have my board exams but I find time to talk about technology and my passion,” he said with arms stretched.

Raul is not like any kid born in the 1980s. The coolest aspects of that generation weaved into the choice of music, haircut and clothes while techie life was about the latest VCR and the impending death of vinyl records in the hands of cassettes. Back then “text” was not a verb, but for Raul what is even “texting” or for that matter “what’s a computer”. Now I get it why Apple had an advertisement a few years ago in which a kid asked: “What’s a computer?”

“I am going to take a session (around AI) for my teachers. I want them to understand what AI is and use it,” he said.

A usual day for this AI enthusiast begins around 5am and then 7.30-ish he has Malayalam tuition, followed by some quick bites and then off to school. When he returns from school, he “chills” catching up on technology, followed by tuition for science subjects. “After that I go through all the tech stuff.. his next bot for content creation and so on.”

Right, what about jobs in the future? How will AI come for us? “What we didn’t think earlier is that bots would come for creative jobs. I feel AI will make a difference in creative fields, like editing a video for an Instagram Reel. I am real and so I use a bit of AI. AI will not take a lot of jobs but it will help us improve our work.”

He wants to educate people on AI. “AI can increase productivity. When computers came, people thought their jobs would go away. It didn’t take all the jobs. Be it Google, Apple, Microsoft, NVIDIA… they are employing people. Something similar is going to happen with AI.”

Fingers crossed Raul. AI is certainly changing work. But we wonder what qualifies as a meaningless job that AI will pounce on.