Programmable computer. Its arrival gave the allies a huge edge in world war ii and saved thousands of lives. It also marked the start of the information age. England built 10 of the colossus machines. And they became the heart of its booming computing industry. Actually, no. This is a replica of colossus. The real machines were destroyed after the war so that the pesky russians would not find out about the technology. The metaphor then is a simple one england dismantled decades of pioneering computing work because it seemed like the proper thing to do, and it has suffered the consequences ever since. As i doubt many of you can name a single tech product or startup that hails from this country. What you will see next then may come as a real shock. Ashlee because in its very subdued, selfeffacing way, england has in fact given rise to a handful of Tech Companies that have impacted the world on an immense scale. I am heading from london to cambridge and into the english countryside to find the best technology that england has to offer. Along the way, there will be fancy hairdryers and aiinfused software. Hello. My name is what is your name . Ashlee and of course there will be a spot of tea, all on this episode of hello world. [dialup modem sounds] ashlee Silicon Valley may be home to some of the biggest tech giants in the world, but it is being challenged like never before. Crazy tech geniuses have popped up all over the planet, making things that will blow your mind. My name is ashlee vance. I am an author, a journalist, and i am on a quest to find the most innovative tech creations and meet the beautiful freaks behind them. Hello world. Ashlee if you tried to design the perfect university town, you would probably fail to think up something as idyllic as cambridge. It is a city filled with temples to learning and young, privileged brainiacs. Hop on a bike and you can go on a ride through academic history, from newtons apple tree right on up to the pub where watson and crick drank to celebrate the discovery of dnas double helix. If that seems boring, you can also be ritually abused at the Old Cambridge market. Thanks. Ugh, it is like sour soap. [laughter] today, cambridge also serves as the heart of englands Tech Industry with its Research Centers, startups, and massive biotech firms. Outside of the university, the biggest reason for cambridges Technology Success is a Company Called arm. It designs chips, and they are the brains at the center of almost every iphone and android smartphone. In short, the modern world runs on arm. Ive met up with my old friend and arm cofounder mike muller to share a warm, british beer and find out how this happened. We are in a pub. What has a pub meant to arm over its history . Mike we met our first ceo in a pub. We are in the pub that is about 100 yards away from where we actually started, and in those days we used to come here every lunchtime, so yeah, it has played an important part in the business. Ashlee right. [laughter] ashlee arm started on something of a whim. Its first Major Customer was apple, which needed a chip for its upcoming newton handheld device. Instead of making a screaming fast, superhot chip like everyone else, arm decided to make a lowpower, energyefficient chip. Soon enough, making lowpower chips became arms thing. It took a while for the bet to pay off, but once mobile phones, and then smart phones arrived, arm ended up as a major force. Mike lifetime, our partners have shipped over 80 billion different chips, and last year there was about two per person on the planet, so that is about 15 billion arm chips shipped. So they are in everything, phones, printers, antilock brakes, televisions, wifi routers, cloud servers, medical devices. I could keep going. Ashlee to mullers point, one of the most innovative and glorious things built around an arm chip is raspberry pi. Ashlee it might not look like much, but this 35 assembly of electronics is a fully functioning computer. There is an arm chip right here, tons of usb ports, an ethernet port, even an hdmi port. With this teeny little thing, you can do just about anything. Released in 2012, the pi has inspired near religious devotion among geeky hobbyists and inventors. Some of them show off their pi creations at things called raspberry jams. I went to see david pride, who has a shrine to the lowcost personal computer at his home in gloucester. What has this little device meant to you . David it has changed my life. I was very happy, very stable, had a nice, well paid job, but i was very, very bored, and i realized at that point that if i wanted to do something different, this was the opportunity to learn the skills that i had always wanted to learn electronics, robotics, coding. Ashlee his house is littered with pi creations, from motorized cars to robots. Greetings to everyone watching hello world. Ashlee [laughter] that is a nice touch. His most famous invention, though, is the fourbot, an aiinfused machine that plays a mean, albeit slow, game of connect four. That is cool. How long did it take you to make this . David about three months of evenings and weekends. Ashlee now i have to go. David you make your move. It is now thinking about the move it has taken. Ashlee oh, you bastard. David you have just lost. Ashlee i feel ashamed. [laughter] ashlee i feel like i should have done more for the humans. Ashlee to really understand the soul of the raspberry pi, i had to head back to its birth place in cambridge and take a boat trip with eben upton. He is the Computer Scientist that invented the pi. Around 2007, eben grew alarmed by the declining number of Computer Science students in england and decided to try and inspire the youngsters with a new approach. Eben i have always assumed cambridge is the best place in the world to study Computer Science, certainly the best place in the u. K. And we saw this collapse in the number of people applying to study Computer Science at the university of cambridge. Which is crazy, because the computing industry is blowing up. Clerk obviously it is a , beautiful environment to come and study in. Greg obviously it is a beautiful it is environment to come and study in. The theory we came up with was that most of us arriving in the mid1990s, like i did, had grown up with a cheap, programmable eightbit micro computers. Ashlee you grew up using the bbc micro. Thats what got you eben thats it. I had a bbc micro at school and sat in the corner of the classroom, and those were beautiful machines. Ashlee supported by the u. K. Government, the bbc micro gave many students their first taste of coding and the possibility of what computers could do. I am just going to scroll up. Ashlee the pi has very much followed in this tradition and emerged as a consumer hit along the way. It is now the third bestselling computer of all time behind the mac and the pc. Eben our lifetime dream volume of 10,000 units, now we are closing in on 10 million. But as that has happened, we just got more ambitious, just got more greedy, i guess, about what we were trying to accomplish. We have gone from can we move the needle on people applying at cambridge to can we do the same for other universities . Can we do the same for other countries . Can we do the same for other subjects . Ashlee think big, Jason Statham impersonator, think big. Coming up next hi, daisy. I interview a baby about the future of Artificial Intelligence. [baby crying] ashlee the intellectual underpinnings of computing began here in cambridge. In 1833, the cambridgetrained mathematician Charles Babbage built a prototype of this thing, the difference engine. It can solve equations with the turn of a crank and some gears, and is considered the first mechanical computer. A hundred years later in the 1930s, another cambridge mathematician named alan turing devised the concepts behind the modernday computer. He proved that a machine can be programmed to calculate just about anything. Decades after turing and babbage, cambridge is still at the cutting edge of computing. Companies like microsoft place their Research Centers here to tap into the local academic talent and to explore their most ambitious ideas. Chris bishop runs this lab and oversees research in a number of areas. One of the most compelling and frightening areas is Artificial Intelligence. Chris this is just an amazingly exciting time in Artificial Intelligence. More and more tasks are becoming solved in image understanding, in speech recognition, and so on. So while we have got a very long way to go before we get to the full capabilities of the human brain, there is a sense that for some kinds of tasks, sort of the barriers have been removed. Ashlee Computer Scientists have dreamed of creating a true Artificial Intelligence for decades. They have been hunting for a machine that can equal or surpass humans. Recently, people like bishop have started to make real headway thanks to an approach called Machine Learning. Chris if you go back to the time of turing, computing is about logic, it is about determinism, and the code, the instructions on which the computer runs are created by humans. As were seeing in Machine Learning, there is something very different. Instead of programming the computer to solve the task, you program the computer to learn from experience, and then we train the computer by showing it lots of examples, giving it lots of data. Ashlee ai powers a ton of experiments here, including this Computer Vision simulation. Microsofts connect sensor used to struggle to make out a hand, and now it can pinpoint the movement of fingers. There is also an aipowered movie recommendation algorithm for xbox that does a pretty good job at figuring out my eclectic taste in movies. You know, actually, i did like twister. Chris ok. Think it lets see what happens this greg lets see what happens this time. Now we see a big change. Ashlee this lab is not just about entertainment, though. They are actually saving lives with a program that can tell the difference between cancerous brain tissue and healthy tissue in an mri. Him and chris what you see here is a pretty nasty brain tumor, so what the Machine Learning is doing now is it is labeling it according to whether it is tissue that has already died or it is tissue that is cancerous and proliferating. This is really important because this is used to design treatments. So we will fire in radiation from lots of different directions, and people tune of up the amount and direction of the radiation to try to kill as much of the cancer as possible, but to do as little damage to normal tissue as we can. Ashlee down the street from microsoft, there is a startup that already has its Ai Technology in the wild. It is called audio analytic, and you can think of it as a type of shazam for realworld sounds. Stephen we use Artificial Intelligence to allow smarthome devices to recognize a whole range of different sounds that happen inside your houses to make your house more secure by detecting glass windows being broken and then turning on the lights to scare off the burglar, taking active protection on things you care about. Ashlee so what do we have here . What is all this stuff . Stephen so we have got a couple of devices that makes this that sound that this detects. Smoke alarm. [alarm sounding] stephen it has detected the i the smoke alarm on there. Nobodys at home, so now it is sending a message. Another sound is glass break. [glass breaking] him and ashlee yeah. Stephen you can see it says, window broken. Ashlee yeah. What is the Science Behind all of this . Stephen we had to do a whole bunch of innovation in terms of understanding sounds, how to a machine understand them. How to detect them and how to have a machine understand them. Even if we take a simple sound like a smoke alarm, the beep, well, now we have two of them going beep at different times. [dog barking] stephen with a whole bunch of background noise going on. That is a big ai problem to solve. Ashlee computers have to be trained to distinguish one sound from another and to learn the unique signature of say glass breaking. [glass breaking] ashlee of course, no two breaking windows sound exactly alike. [glass breaking] ashlee so these guys get to relieve stress by breaking a lot of glass. [glass breaking] ashlee how many windows have you had to break . Stephen windows we have literally filled warehouses for months on end. Different sizes, different thicknesses, different types of glass. [glass breaking] ashlee how many smoke alarms . Stephen smoke alarms, we literally bought all the smoke alarms that you can find in the marketplace, and then indexed all of those. That was a huge undertaking logistically. Ashlee the software can also recognize the sound of a baby crying. Hi, daisy. [baby crying] ashlee oh, hi. And, as luck would have it, we found a cute, hungry baby on which to experiment. [baby crying] stephen so you can see on the screen that it is detecting the baby crying. Hlee audio Analytic Software already ships inside a number of smarthome products, and the Company Plans on adding many more sounds. Stephen there we go. Ashlee but for now, it is the Perfect Technology to discover when an angry baby has thrown a smoke alarm through a window. Next stop, i head to london to explore more serious matters, like getting the perfect hairdo. I feel like i am two inches taller now. [laughter] ashlee i arrived in england at the height of brexit mania. The tourists were happy because the entire country had gone on sale. Some of the locals were morose, and some of them just didnt care, like the people drinking these 20 cocktails at a fancy hotel bar. Nothing says hello to financial ruin like sipping rum from an elephant made of legos or gin from whatever this is. You know who else doesnt care about brexit . People willing to pay 400 for a hairdryer. Dyson, as we all know, has perfected suck. Now, it is on to blow. Meet the supersonic. Ashlee according to the ample dyson propaganda, this is the smartest hairdryer ever built. It uses an electric Digital Motor to produce an intense stream of air and then sensors to make sure that air never gets too hot. As a result, your hair comes out shinier and healthier than ever before. I feel like i am two inches taller now. [laughter] ashlee to see how dyson built this thing, i had to leave london and head to the companys headquarters in the picturesque town of malmesbury. James dyson founded this company in 1991 and has created his very own engineering paradise. [horn honking] ashlee the dyson campus is littered with his toys of course you have a plane in the cafeteria and made up of a handful of invention factories. My first stop was with someone who leads a constant battle to come up with ideas for brandnew products and reinvent some old ones. Matthew hairdryers havent changed in sort of 60 years. If we look at this cutaway here, you see they got a very large motor inside like that. That weight you are holding for 20 minutes, half an hour, while you are drying your hair, and very, very noisy, so we thought it was a good product to get into. Ashlee dyson spent four years and 71 million to bring the supersonic to life, and, as you might expect, they are obsessivecompulsive when it comes to hair. Matthew we felt that we had to learn everything about hair. The science of hair. We had to build our own laboratory to learn about hair for ourselves, to know what causes damage, causes shine, what makes your hair look lovely. Ashlee hi, matthew. Matthew hi welcome to lab 61. Greg is dysons electric motor wizard. He spent more than a decade developing the core of many of dysons product. The miniature turbine. Matthew this is more attuned to a jet engine you find on a commercial airline than anything else. Ashlee how fast does it spin around . Matthew 150,000 rpm, so that is about 1800 revolutions every second. Ashlee yeah. That seems almost impossible. Matthew it is possible through very Fast Electronics and a mechanical system that is able to take the stresses, the strains for hundreds of hours at full speed. Mechanical system that is able ashlee the electric Motor Technology will be key to dysons continued push into new product areas. Some people say it is secretly working on an electric car. What types of things would this be useful in . Matthew at the moment, we have applied it to the hair dryer. We will have to wait to see what comes next. [laughter] ashlee i knew you would say that. Matthew i can only say that. Ashlee the drive to invent and salesmanship present dyson is present in dyson is something of an anomaly here. Englands beloved cynicism runs counter to the hypefueled optimism that dominates the Tech Industry. The brits do a fine job at promoting a pub lunch, but do less well at spurring on entrepreneurs and inventors. It is clear enough, though, that when the english really get stuck into something, they do it well. It is not hyperbole to say that arms chips have changed the world, or that raspberry pi may well have altered a generation for the better. And, if you are inclined to try and think big, there remains no better place to do it than in cambridge, where you can meditate in peace among the cows. [cow mooing] ashlee up next on hello world, i head to japan and wake from a fever dream to find this, this, and whatever this is. Whoooo. I enjoy the fresher things in life. Fresh towels. Fresh soaps. And of course, tripadvisors freshest, lowest prices. So if youre anything like me. Youll want to check tripadvisor. We now instantly compare prices from over 200 booking sites. To find you the lowest price. On the hotel you want. Go on, try something fresh. Tripadvisor. The latest reviews. The lowest prices. David are there many who said, i want to be the leading cellist in the world . Yoyo in music there is no such thing as this is the greatest anything, because it is about learning forever. David what about where you play . Yoyo you dont have to be there. I dont have to be there. So if we are going to spend time together, lets make it count. Would you fix your tie, please . David well, people wouldnt recognize me if my tie was fixed, but ok. Just leave it this way. Alright