Of George Papadopoulos and Paul Manafort on its front page. Its the top story in the guardian too, summed up in its headline trump under new pressure after ex aide admits perjury. Its a different lead in the metro. Its splash is the government promising a crackdown against Sexual Harassment at westminster. Its the same lead for the Daily Telegraph the paper says the story could turn out to be more embarrassing for mps than the expenses scandal. The times is one of several papers to feature a picture of kevin spacey who today apologised for inappropriate advances a young actor claims he made when he was only fourteen. And the express focuses on a health story the paper says a dose of aspirin a day can halve the risk of developing some cancers. Now its time for hardtalk. Welcome to hardtalk with me, stephen sackur. For now, the abc employs human beings like me to question the way the world works. For how much longer . The bbc employs human beings. As research into Artificial Intelligence intensifies, is there any sphere of human activity that wont be revolutionised by ai and robotics . My guest today is alan winfield, a world renowned professor of robot ethics. From driving, to education, to work and warfare, are we unleashing machines which could turn the dark visions of Science Fiction into science fact . Alan winfield, welcome to hardtalk. Delighted to be here, stephen. You do have a fascinating title, director of robot ethics, im tempted to ask you, whats more important to you, the engineering, robotics or the ethics, being an ethicist . Both are equally important. Im fundamentally an engineer so i bring an engineering perspective to robotics but more than half of my work now is thinking about. Im kind of a professional warrior now. Worrier now. Would you say the balance has shifted over the course of your career . You started out very much in computers and engineering but increasingly as you have dug deeply into the subject, in a sense the more philosophical side of it has been writ large for you . Absolutely right. It was really getting involved in public engagement, robotics public engagement, 15 years ago that if you like alerted me and sensitised me to the ethical questions around robotics and ai. Lets take this phrase, Artificial Intelligence. It raises an immediate question in my mind, how we define intelligence. I wonder if you could do that for me . Its really difficult, one of the fundamental philosophical problems with al is we dont have a satisfactory definition for natural intelligence. Heres a simple definition, its doing the right thing at the right time, but thats not very helpful from a scientific point of view. One thing we can say about intelligence is its not one thing we all have more or less of. What about thinking . Are we really, as in the course of this conversation, talking about the degree to which human beings can make machines that think . I think thinking is a dangerous word. Its an anthropomorphisation and in gact more than that its a humanisation of the term intelligence. A lot of the intelligence you and i have is nothing to do with conscious reflective thought. One of the curious things about al is that what we thought would be very difficult 60 years ago, like playing board games, chess, go as it happens, has turned out to be not easy but relatively easy, whereas what we thought would be very easy 60 years ago, like making a cup of tea in somebody elses kitchen, has turned out to be enormously difficult. Its interesting you light upon board games so quickly because in the news in the last few days weve seen something quite interesting, Googles Deepmind department has this machine, computer, call it what you will, the alphago zero i think they call it, which has achieved i think astounding results playing this game, im not familiar with it, a game called go, mainly played in china, extremely complex, more moves in it, more complexity than chess, and this machine is now capable of beating it seems any human grandmaster and the real thing about it is its a machine that appears to learn unsupervised. Thats right. I must admit, im somewhat baffled by this, you said dont think about thinking but it seems this is a machine that thinks. Its a machine that does an artificial analogue of thinking, it doesnt do it in the way you and i do. The technology is based on what are called Artificial Neural Networks and they are if you like an abstract model of biological networks, neural networks, brains in other words, which actually we dont understand very well curiously but we can still make very simple abstract models, and thats what the technology is. The way to think about the way it learns, and it is a remarkable breakthrough, i dont want to over hype it because it only plays go, it cant make a cup of tea for you, but the very interesting thing is the early generations effectively had to be trained on data that was gleaned from human experts and many, many games of go. It had to be loaded with external information . Essentially, thats right. Thats what we call supervised learning, whereas the new version, and again, if i understand it correctly, i only scanned the nature paper this morning, is doing unsupervised learning. We actually technically call it reinforcement learning. The idea is that the machine is given nothing else than if you like the rules of the game and its world is the board, the go board and the pieces, and then itjust essentially plays against itself millions and millions of times. Its a bit like, you know, a human infant learning how to, i dont know, play with building blocks, lego, entirely on his or her own byjust learning over and over again. Of course, humans dont actually learn like that, mostly we learn with supervision, with parents, teachers, brothers and sisters, family and so on. Youre prepared to use a word like learning, thinking you dont like, learning youre prepared to apply to a machine . Yes. What i want to get to, before we go into the specifics of Driverless Cars and autonomous fighting machines and all of that, i still want to stay with big pictu re stuff. The human brain, youve already mentioned the human brain, its the most complex mechanism we know on this planet. In the universe in fact. Is it possible, talking about the way that google mind and others are developing Artificial Intelligence, that we can all look to create machines that are as complex with the billions and trillions of moving parts, if i can put it that way, that the human brain possesses . I would say in principle, yes, but not for a very long time. I think the problem of making an ai or robot if you like, a robot isjust ai in a physical body, that is comparable in intelligence to a human being, an average human being if you like, averagely intelligent human being, is extraordinary difficult and part of the problem, part of the reason its so difficult is we dont actually have the design, if you like, the architecture of human minds. But in principle you think we can get it . What im driving at really is this principle philosophical question of what the brain is. To you, professor, is the brain in the end chemistry . Is it material . Is it a lump of matter . Yes. Does it have any spiritual or any other tangible thing . It is chemistry . Im a materialist, yes, the brain is thinking meat. That is a bit of a copout. You said thinking meat, it is meat and the way that meat is arranged means it could think, so you could create something artificial where, if it was as complex and well arranged as Human Capacity could make it one day, it could also think . I believe in principle, yes. But the key thing is architecture. In a sense, the way to think about the current work on Artificial Intelligence, we have these Artificial Neural Networks which are almost like the building blocks. Its a bit like having marble, butjust having a lot of wonderful italian marble doesnt mean you can make a cathedral, you need to have the design, you need to have the architecture and the know how to build that cathedral and we dont have anything like that. One more general point and then i want to get down to the specifics. Nick bostrom at oxford university, you know him, i know you do because he works in the same field as you, you have to think of ai as a fundamental game changer for humanity. It could be the last invention that human intelligence ever needs to make, he says, because its the beginning of a completely new era, the Machine Intelligence era and in a sense we are a bit like children playing with something we have picked up and it happens to be an unexploded bomb and we dont even know the consequences that could come with it. Do you share that vision . I partially share it. Where i disagree with nick is that i dont think we are under threat from a kind of runaway super intelligence, which is the thesis of his book of that subject, superintelligence, but i do think we need to be ever so careful. In a way, i alluded to this earlier, we dont understand what natural intelligence is, we dont have any general scientific theory of intelligence so trying to build artificial general intelligence is a bit like trying to do particle physics at cern without any theory, without any underlying scientific theory. It seems to me that we need both some serious theory, which we dont have yet, we have some but it isnt unified, there isnt a single theory if you like like the standard model physics. We also need to do responsible research and innovation. In other words we need to innovate ethically to make sure any as it were unintended consequences are foreseen and we had them off. Lets talk in a more practical sense, unintended consequences may well come up. Lets start with something i think most of us are aware of now, and regard as one of the most both challenging and perhaps exciting specific ai achievements, that is the driverless car. Yes. It seems to me all sorts of issues are raised by a world in which cars are driverless. A lot of moral and ethical issues as well as practical ones. You work with people in this field, are you excited by Driverless Cars . Iam, yes. I think Driverless Cars have tremendous potential for two things. Do you see them as robots . I do, yes, a driverless car is a robot. Typically once a robot becomes part of normal life we stop calling it a robot, like a vacuum cleaner. I think there are two tremendous advances from Driverless Cars we can look forward to, one is reducing the number of People Killed in road traffic accidents significantly, if we can achieve that, so im going to be cautious when i speak more on this. The other is giving mobility to people, elderly people, disabled people who currently dont have that. Both of those are very practical but Science Magazine last year studied a group of almost 2,000 people, ask them about what they wanted to see in terms of the morale at the almost of using Driverless Cars, how the programming of the car would be developed to ensure that, for example, in a hypothetical, if a car was on the road and it was about to crash but if it veered off the road to avoid a crash it would hit a group of schoolchildren being led by a teacher down the road. The public in this survey wanted to know that the car would in the end accept its own destruction and that of its driver, human passenger rather, as opposed to saving itself and ploughing into the children on the side of the road. How do you as a robot ethicist cope with this sort of challenge . The first thing id say is lets not get it out of proportion. You have to ask yourself as a human driver, probably like me youve got many years of experience of driving, have you ever encountered that situation . Not in my case, but i want to know if i ever step into a driverless car someone has thought about this. I think youre right. The ethicists and the lawyers are not clear. The point is we need to have a conversation. I think its really important that if we have Driverless Cars that make those kinds of ethical decisions, you know, that essentially decide whether to potentially harm the occupants. Youre doing what you told me off for doing, youre anthropomorphising, it wouldnt be making an ethical decision, it would be reflecting the values of the programmer. Those rules need to be decided by the whole of society. The fact is, whatever those rules are, there will be occasions when the rules result in consequences that we dont like and therefore i think the whole of Society Needs to if you like own the responsibility for those cases. So you are making a call, be it Driverless Cars or any other examples were thinking about with al, of the Technological Developments in lockstep with a new approach to monitoring, regulation, universal standardisation. And a conversation, a Big Conversation in society so that we own the ethics that we decide should be embedded. But that will not help. Much of the development here, i mean, you work at bristol in a robotics lab but a lot of cutting edge work is being done in the private sector. Some of it is done by secretive defence establishments. There is no standardisation, there is no cooperation. It is a deeply competitive world. Itjolly well needs to be. My view is simple. The autopilot of a driverless car should be subject to the same levels of compliance with Safety Standards as the autopilot of an aircraft. We all accept. You and i would not get into an aircraft if we thought that the autopilot had not met those very high standards. It is inconceivable that we could allow Driverless Cars on our roads that have not passed those kind of safety certification processes. Leaving Driverless Cars and going to areas that are, perhaps, more problematic for human beings. They developed the idea of the machine, the future intelligent machine, taking jobs and roles that have traditionally always been done by human beings because they involve things like empathy and care. And compassion. Im thinking about roles of social care and education. Even, frankly, a Sexual Partner because we all now read about the sexbots that are being developed. In these roles, do you feel comfortable with the notion that machines will take over from human beings . No. And i do not think they will. But they already are. Japan has carers. A care robot may well be able to care for you, for example, for your physical needs, but it cannot care about you. Only humans can care about either humans or any other animal. Object, robots cannot care about people or things, for that matter. And the same is true for teachers. Teachers typically care about their classes. You think some people are getting way overheated about this . One of the most well known teachers here in britain he now says that in his vision of a future education system, many children will be taught one on one in a spectacular new way by machines. He says it is like giving every child access to the best private school. Ultimately, there may well be. And we are talking about into the future, some combination of machine teaching and human teaching. You cannot take the human out. An important thing to remember here is particularly human characteristics of empathy, sympathy. Theory of mind, the ability to anticipate, to read each other. These are uniquely human characteristics as is our creativity and innovation and intuition. These are things we have no idea how to build artificially. Jobs that involve those things are safe. Interesting. People nowadays are looking at doomsday scenarios with the development of robotics and ai where frankly, mostjobs one can think of and i was being flippant earlier about being replaced by a robot but you suggest to me that so many differentjobs, notjust blue collar but white collar as well will be done by machines. Again, are we overstating it . I think we are. Yes. I am not saying that will not happen eventually but i think that what we have is much more time than people suppose to find a harmonious, if you like, accommodation between human and machine. That actually allows us to exploit the qualities of humans and the skills, the things that humans want to do which is, you know. If you dont mind me saying, you seem both extraordinarily sanguine and comfortable and optimistic about the way in which ai is developing under the control of human beings, and yourfaith in humanitys ability to co operate on this and establish standards seems to run in the face of facts. In one area is weaponisation. The notion that al and robotics will revolutionise warfare and warfighting. You were one of 1000 senior scientists who signed an appeal for a ban on al weaponry in 2015. That that will not happen, will it . The ban. It may. Did you see what Vladimir Putin said . He said that Artificial Intelligence is the future for russia and all of humankind and this is the key bit, whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world. I am an optimist but i am also very worried about exactly this thing. We have already seen, if you like, the political weaponisation of ai. It is clear, isnt it, that the evidence is mounting that al was used in recent elections . You are talking about the hacking . And some of that believe is from russia . That is political weaponisation and we do need to be worried about these things. We do need to have ethical standards and we need to have worldwide agreement. I am optimistic about a ban on lethal autonomous weapons systems. The campaign is gaining traction, there have been all kinds of discussions and i know some of the people involved quite well in the United Nations. But we know the limitations of the United Nations and the limitations of politics and we know that human nature usually leads to the striving to compete and to win, whether it be in politics or in the battlefield. Can i leave you with this thought . It seems that there is a debate within science and you are on one side being sanguinary and optimistic. Perhaps on the other side, Stephen Hawking recently said that the development of full Artificial Intelligence could spell the end of the human race. Do you find that kind of thought helpful or deeply unhelpful . Deeply unhelpful. The problem is that it is not inevitable. What he is talking about here is a very small probability. If you like it is a very long series of if this happens, then if that happens, then this and so on and on. I wrote about this in the observer back in 2014. Before Stephen Hawking got involved in this debate. My view is that we are worrying about an extraordinarily unlikely event, that is the intelligence explosion,. Do you think we have actually been too conditioned by Science Fiction and by the terminator concept . We have. There is no doubt. The problem is that we are fascinated. It is a combination of fear and fascination and that is why we love Science Fiction. But in your view it is fiction . That scenario is fiction that you are quite right, there are things we should worry about now. We need to worry aboutjobs, we need to worry about weaponisation of ai and we need to worry about standards in Driverless Cars and care robots, in medical diagnosis ais. There are many things that are here and now problems in the sense that are kind of more to do with the fact that al is not very intelligent so we need to worry about artificial stupidity. That is a neat way of ending. Alan winfield, thank you very much. Hello there. For many of us the weather is on the turn and it is turning that bit milder. We look at the temperatures we had at tulloch bridge on monday morning, reaching 5 but this morning, 10 celsius. A 15 degree rise. Cloud and rain around, but is that cloudy weather bringing in mild conditions across much of the country. The rain will be at its heaviest across western scotland, a bit patchy across the east. A little misty over the high ground but no desperate problems with visibility. Just a little mist over the top of the hills. Further southwards across northern wales, partly cloudy with a few showers. Some bright spells to start the day across southern counties of england. Possibly an isolated shower for east anglia and the south east. That will clear away quickly in the morning so what we are left with is bright weather across southern areas. The south westerly winds bringing in mild conditions but we could potentially see a spell of rain for a time during the afternoon affecting parts of wales and then moving on into parts of north west england. Always the wettest weather will be actually across western scotland. It should stay dry for most of the day across much of the midlands, southern england and the far south of wales. Temperatures reaching 1a degrees or so. Spooky night coming up for trick and treaters. Bits of rain across the north west and quite wet for western scotland as well. Clearer spells further south. Temperature wise overnight we are looking at lows between eight and 11 celsius. This weather front is going to become very slow moving across western scotland with the rain building up in those Western Hills as we go on through the day on wednesday. That weather front moves nowhere fast. For most of the uk, mild south, south westerly winds coming in across the country so it will be a mild day. Temperatures reaching 12 15 degrees, turning a little cooler and fresher perhaps across the far north west of scotland. We have some cool air moving southwards as we go through wednesday night into thursday behind this cold front. We should start to see some bright spells working in, possibly the best across eastern scotland and parts of northern england. A bit of cloud further south, bits and pieces of light rain and drizzle around. Towards the end of the day we will see the return of some cooler air coming back across the uk. That said, on friday we will have a reasonably quiet weather day with a little rain moving southwards. To the start of the weekend we will probably have a spell of heavy rain for a time in england and then some showers following through the north west. This is the briefing. Im sally bundock. Our top story the white house says theres no evidence of collusion between president trumps Election Campaign and russia as facebook reveals the shocking scale of the russian linked bid to sway voters. Sacked catalan president Carles Puigdemont has gone to belgium, amid reports he may claim asylum as spain considers charging him with rebellion. Hundreds of refugees refuse to leave an australian run Detention Centre thats set to close this morning because of fears for their safety. And our top business story is it too little too late for the city of london . The bank of england warns as many as 75,000 jobs could be lost as a result of brexit. Shortly ill bejoined by inga beale, the boss of one