In state from where the refugees have fled alleging arson looting rape and murder by soldiers and Buddhist mobs South Korea's prime minister has indicated that certain conditions need to be met before the country's president can accept an offer to meet the North Korean leader the invitation came from Mr Kim Sr talks with the South Korean president on Saturday North Korean media said the meeting was Franken cordial but they haven't reported Kim Jong un's offer of a summit with Mr Moon the u.s. Is unlikely to welcome a meeting between the 2 Korean leaders unless the north agrees to discuss its nuclear weapons world news from the b.b.c. South Africa's governing African National Congress is beginning celebrations to mark 100 years since the birth of the country's 1st black president Nelson Mandela the party leader serum opposer will give a speech and freedom square in Cape Town where Mr Mandela made his 1st public address following his release from prison 28 years ago today the current president Jacob Zuma who's facing corruption allegations is resisting calls to stand down the Chief Minister of the Pradesh India's largest state has revealed that a 1000000 students have skipped matriculation examinations this year following steps taken by his government to stop widespread cheating Yogi added You're not said the sharp drop in numbers was evident over the last 4 days that the exams were being held he said this was a result of his administration's efforts to tackle what he called the Education Murphy where he's been accused of corrupting the exam process. Thousands of people have joined rallies across Canada to protest against the acquittal of a white farmer who shot state an Indigenous man on Friday and all white jury found Gerald Stanley not guilty of murdering Colton bougie in 2016 Mr bougie who was crazy was shot when he and 4 others drove on to Mr Stanley's property in so sketch one province protesters chanted and marched in freezing temperatures to demand justice for Mr Bush's family speaking at a rally his mother called for an end to the killing of indigenous people in Canada a 17 year old American snowboarder was the surprise gold medal winner of the slope style competition at the Winter Olympics in South Korea red Gerard said he hadn't expected even to reach the final but I was asked my just on myself I want to enter and I was a little bundle my 1st surrounds to say fell a couple times but. I was just so happy that all work that b.b.c. News. This is the b.b.c. World Service I'm Anthony Zircher in Washington d.c. And this is the 3 pillars of Trump. From this day forward a new vision will govern our land from this day forward it's going to be only America Birch America 1st I. Present inauguration speech he was very clear he was going to change the way America was going to be governed but one year on how has Trump changed the 3 pillars of American government defense diplomacy and health care my administration is committed to fighting the drug epidemic and helping get treatment for those in need for those who have been so terribly. In final program of the series we look at health care. When the history of Donald Trump's 1st year in office is written much will be made of the things he did accomplish shifts in foreign policy changes in u.s. Defense posture massive tax cuts for American business and the churn and disruption of a presidency untethered from the norms and traditions of the past. As significant as those achievements however is the story of the president's health care efforts laws not past changes not made now I have to tell you since the leave oblique complex subject nobody knew that health care could be so complicated sirrah Karlin Smith a health reporter for Politico and Washington told me what happened President term came in the Republicans controlled the White House both sides of Congress and they came in with this what they felt like was a re big mandate to diminish Obamacare and they felt like they could get that done pretty fast they set really ambitious timelines and then turned out it was much harder to figure out if you're going to take it away what you replace it with and get everybody even within their party on board with a replacement plan so they spent most of the year kind of. Bumbling around to a certain degree with different plans and just never found something that could please their whole caucus and get a deal done Donald Trump found himself at the head of unified Republican control of the us government majorities in both chambers of Congress ensured that his party could set the agenda and at the top of that agenda was health care reform and undoing the legislative legacy of his predecessor Barack Obama who had overseen sweeping changes and new federal regulation of the u.s. Health system Obamacare that label originated as a derisive nickname by Republican critics but it became a badge of pride for the then president who touted the expanded health insurance coverage as program provided now it was time to roll it all back together we're going to deliver real change that once again puts America 1st. That begins with the immediately repealing and replacing the disaster known as Obamacare the what it wasn't so simple replace is a slogan it's not an actual public policy Ronnie Whitlock who spent 20 years as a top congressional staffer specializing in health care explains and the challenge they faced was when they tried to change that slogan to real policy it became much more difficult than they thought it would be now it got very close House of Representatives passed a bill in the Senate knocked on the door a couple times but 123 members were the difference between success and failure we were very close. It's a very very tight margin. But there was action outside of the Congress as Sarah Carlin Smith explains on the legislative side you could say their aim to go after Obamacare was probably a failure but on the administrative side through the executive branch they actually were fairly successful so one of the most recent things and that big tax reform package that was passed in the u.s. . Yes if they got rid of the individual mandate which is a requirement that you have to have health insurance coverage in the us or else you pay a fine and that's seen as being a big hit to Obamacare for much of 2017 the health care debate in Washington was an abstract one how involved should the federal government be in regulating the health insurance market where should federal dollars be spent the decisions being made however would have a real world impact proposed reductions to funding could hit rural and working class communities hard at a moment of particular peril as opioid addiction was becoming a growing public health crisis in many states we owe it to our children and to our country to do everything in our power to address this national shame and this human tragedy President Trump stopped short of declaring the opioid crisis a national emergency opting instead for a public health emergency declaration it will streamline some access to addiction treatment but provides few new resources and I'm saying officially right now it is an emergency it's a national emergency it would be very easy for President Trump to do better than President Obama on the opioid addiction epidemic and he certainly has done better when it comes to speaking about the problem Andrew Kalani a professor at Brandeis University and specialist in the subject says that Trump started with an advantage over his predecessor he campaigned on the opiate addiction epidemic saying that he would do something about it when he came into office and since he's been off in office he has spoken about the problem he even designated the opiate addiction crisis a public health emergency what we haven't seen from the trumpet ministration has been any action which is quite strange because to call something an emergency which he did months ago. And then to do nothing about it it says if you're pointing to a burning building and saying we've got a burning building it's an emergency and then you don't call the fire department you watch it burn down I want to find out more about the impact and potential response to this crisis so I traveled to Kentucky a state that has been described as the Ground 0 of the opioids epidemic. The seeds of the opioid epidemic were planted here in Kentucky a floor Unger a reporter at the Louisville Courier Journal newspaper it has changed over the years it definitely started out more as a pill epidemic in eastern Kentucky that was ground 0 for the prescription drug abuse and since then it has morphed in many ways and heroin has become a real problem starting in the urban areas but now really everywhere around Kentucky suitable. To the. Trolls hate is a retired administrator at a Kentucky school he recalls how opioids affected students it was horrible for about 4 or 5 years it was constant and again I had there was this class that was just bad and you know usually I like to say there's 10 percent of a high school class that's not doing the right things you know living on the edge this when I was 10 percent were doing the right things and they were all snorting drugs and Jack ting. You know out of that class. 4 or 5 and that's out of like $110115.00 kids for 5 or probably another 15 or 20. Have probably o d Kentucky state capital Frankfort I met and the state's young attorney general a Democrat the opioid epidemic has now spread through every single part of society here in the. Knighted states it knows no geographical barriers and it knows no socio economic barriers you see widespread addiction and the use of opioids in every single sector of Kentucky you see it in the rural areas you see it in our cities you see it from families that have high socio economic status and those that do not these are powerful drugs that will kill you they don't care who you are they'll kill you t.j. Walton he was 21 years old when he lost his life to the drug Opana and 2012 t.j. Was Emily Walden son I did not know much about it at all had no idea there was a perception drug epidemic he didn't know either he made a bad decision and he almost immediately became addicted somebody offered him an Oxycontin out of with a group of friends and he took it and went then a week or so he had spiraled and became. Addicted to the drug Opana which was very very prevalent in Louisville Kentucky during that time Opana is prescription pain killing medication so he for a couple years there was back and forth he would stay away from it for a little while he did go to treatment and it would pull him back again and he did not want to be addicted he tell me numerous times he didn't want to die. And then tried very hard to overcome the addiction and he had gone on a camping trip with friends and I believe it was one last time and that's when he passed away. Since 2012 however the scale of the problem has worsened in Kentucky van Ingram executive director of the Kentucky Office of Drug Control Policy told me how he feels it personally I go to bed thinking about those 4800 people who lost 26 feet and I think about it every day when I get a good Texas holds its somebody some somebody's daughter somebody's mother somebody's father somebody's brother somebody's sister somebody's friend at the University of Kentucky as Injury Prevention Research Center they have been collecting data about overdose deaths I met researchers involved in that war Dana quiz and Barry recounted how the prescription epidemic developed and then moved from prescription drugs to heroin and recently the more powerful Fenton that effort to limit the access to prescription drugs created somewhat of a void but it wasn't that when was it already in Kentucky because it was but we had this population then of individuals that war for the lack of a better word addicted and then made the transition to illicitly available heroin at a cheaper expense much more attractive to him shut down the pill mills but by that time the problem had already started and that was snowballing we saw what we called the trail of pills to Florida so you'd put a carload of 4 people together drive to Florida everyone see a doctor or 2 while they were there and bring back up to $11000.00 individual pills in that carload every time they came back and so when we passed the bill in 2012 it essentially opened they looked for another market to be able to acquire what they were looking for and then over time Florida got involved in helping to shut that down and that's why we don't have the market that's available for you here where the customer base that essentially for heroin in fact don't come along. Since her son's death Emily Walden has campaigned against opioids while holding down a full time job I hadn't started researching the drug Opana even prior to my son's stat that after he passed away that next year I flew to Washington for the 1st time in my life she met Mitch McConnell her senator at that time and 2013 there was no legislation there was nothing. In Washington every year I have met the next year I had 9 meetings year after that I had 13 meetings begging for change days after speaking to us she was due to go to Washington again to meet the Food and Drug Administration the f.d.a. I'm going to the f.d.a. To speak to the opioid steering committee and hopefully they met with our new f.d.a. Commissioner that they will make changes necessary and correct the mistakes they've made in the past that is led to this epidemic Emily has the whole hearted support of Kentucky's attorney general Andy Bashir who days ago announced a legal action on opioids so I've committed that I'm going to drug every single one of these companies that knew how addictive these painkillers were and marketed them widely anyways into a Kentucky court where they have to answer to the families that they have harmed Kentucky is not the only state taking drug companies to court and it indicates how the states themselves are taking an initiative in the absence of federal activity but what scale of federal intervention could be needed to make an impact on this crisis Andrew Clagny So our opioid crisis is an addiction epidemic and the reason we're experiencing record high levels of opioid overdose deaths the reason we're seeing heroin infantile fled into non-urban areas the reason we're seeing a soaring increase an infant's born opioid dependent outbreaks of injection related infectious diseases impact on the workforce children entering the foster care system the driver behind all of these health and social problems has been the sharp increase in the number of Americans who are opioid addicted and if we want to bring the problem ultimately to an end and at least under control. There Really couple things that we have to accomplish we have to prevent more Americans from becoming opioid addicted we have to reduce the incidence the number of new cases of opiate addiction that occur every year and for the millions who are addicted we have to see that they're getting access to the most effective treatments it appeared for a while the President Trump was seeking answers he set up an opioid commission chaired by former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie one of the commissioners was former Congressman Patrick Kennedy a member of the Kennedy family a Democrat and a mental health campaigner who is in recovery from prescription painkiller addiction himself I asked him what the commission did and how its report was received would have published it in November of last year well I think the progress of the commission which was very very good I think we outlined a very comprehensive approach to addressing this child on many fronts and so we made very detailed recommendations and I think they've already formed the basis of what I understand to be some important federal policies that are in the works to stop some of these proposals however and this is a big however talk is cheap if it's not followed up with the resources and you could tell the administration's true commitment to this last from what they say then from what they do and I am in recovery myself and. They have a saying you can talk the talk but what's most important is whether you walk the walk and frankly by that definition this administration has been all talk and no walk the president is still making a commitment to tackle the crisis as he made clear in his State of the Union address just a few days ago our response to the terrible crisis of opioid and. Drug addiction never before has it been like it is now it is terrible we have to do something about it for those like Rodney Whitlock who have worked in health care politics for many years that raises serious challenges is very clear that people who truly understand the nature of the crisis is that. The change that people who are addicted experience this is not something that you make go away in this is a day to day fighting every moment of every day the challenges you now face once addicted the idea that you can make it go away and we've solved a problem it's just too facile and that's the struggle I think Washington has where we desperately want to to have these are solutions to be able to shore constituents this is how we succeed he says there's also another issue about how the president's health care policy is developed the challenge I think that those of us observing see this trying to understand where policy occurs during most of ministration And for those wanting federal action on opioids and are Kalani has a warning but we haven't seen is a plan from the administration agencies there are many different federal agencies that have a piece of this problem before he even announced that this is a public health emergency he should have had a plan from each of his agencies so that when he made that announcement he would have said at the same time and here is what we're going to do about it that never happened and we still have no plan of action from his agencies there's also been change at the top of the Health and Human Services Department itself Paul Ginsburg Acheron health policy studies at the Brookings Institution told me what he expected from the incoming secretary Alex is our this is really a change from the initial Secretary Tom Price who was very much the idea one towards very very pragmatic experience paychecks your secretary and Alex a czar and I'm actually expecting prove relation to Congress I'm expecting h.h.s. To become a bigger factor in him health policy in the administration and perhaps having more because there's big. I bring you a much more pragmatic and capable individual who has very strong links both through our people ministration Congress away from the political and administrative complexities of Washington what do those people who elected Donald Trump make of the president's health care policy and on opioids in particular on Staten Island job really is a New York City Councilman I think most people involved the issue in counties that are affected would be eager to convey the president that we this is actually one of the problems where money does help the situation there's no shortage of customers for lack of a better word the shortage comes in the beds at these inpatient facilities a short taxi ride away from Joe is Carl's House Recovery Center for addicts it was set up by Marco Donna My name is Marco to Donna I'm a person in a long term recovery from heroin for now 3 years I've been clean I'm 33 years old. And I got caught up in the opioid epidemic started in 2002 a market is desk sits an overdose prevention kit it's not can't get and what it is is it's a nasal injectable spray of someone's overdosing from heroin or any kind of opiate based drugs that they can get brought back to life and I carry one all the time and we also do training here and a lot of people do use them actually bringing it over to a family member right now to how to use it 2 days ago and someone in the house set up Carl's house when people approached him to ask how he had managed to recover he says one thing the president has done is raise the profile of the subject the money is finally. I guess you could say coming through now that the president and government is on board saying it is a national emergency you know before no one wanted to talk about it you know you would probably get elected if you wanted to run on the drumbeat of drug person in office you know and by starting from the top and they're actually open them out and talking about it the president in his policy speech is going into the next budget year has said that he wants to increase spending for opioids so you know Congress does ultimately control the power of the purse and I think there is a large enough bipartisan block to push for additional opiate resources back in Louisville Kentucky I visited the healing place where I met Patrick who started as a patient and now works at the center I started using again before I came back here and that's why I think I'm for the detox you know because I needed to come back here detox and I was really at that point the pain was greater than the plan of using anymore so what has it done to your community here at home town when you go back and see it when you were living there. When I moved out is going to type it's a really small town maybe 32000 people in the whole county and it was a really nice little small community but over the last 15 years between the bills of methamphetamine it has destroyed every person that I know every person I grew up with is either in jail for a decade or fighting this disease on the streets very few people from where I'm from actually get clean and people have died from it and you know people died from it yes. Quite a few people back at home have overdosed with the heroin epidemic but the majority of people that I know have died have been in the city alone so I was it's huge here . Patrick was 1st given opiates by military doctors when he was injured during a tour in Iraq with the army that's when the addiction began. There's a lot of blame assigned for the opioid crisis well meaning doctors and some less so . Companies rapacious dealers and smugglers a government that was slow to address the spread of the crisis and has struggled to devise a coherent health care policy a Washington debates the death toll continues to mount. Said he wants to change that it's his top public health priority. This pillar of his presidency is straining under the weight of needs and expectations. Have been 3 pillars of health care on the b.b.c. World Service. Distribution of the b.b.c. World Service in the us has made possible by American Public Media producer in distributor of award winning public radio content a.p.m. American Public Media which supports move move helps businesses of all sizes stand out with premium quality print products and human to human customer service learn more Move dot com. I'm Gareth Mitchell with technology this half hour here on the b.b.c. World Service today one of the world's best known technology universities pledges to revolutionize humankind's understanding of itself and therefore how to get the best out of artificial intelligence the algorithms they say are still too firmly rooted in the past we're also looking at cloning specifically cloning our own voices and we talk visual effects with the supervisor of Blade Runner 2049 that's clicked on b.b.c. News with Jerry Smit the British Aid charity Oxfam says new accusations that his staff use sex workers during overseas missions are shocking the latest allegations concerning its team in Chad in 2006 it emerged on Friday that Oxfam employees had used sex workers in Haiti while helping earthquake victims Britain's foreign secretary Boris Johnson is holding talks with me Ahmad's de facto leader unsound Suchi is expected to call for a Hindu refugees to be allowed to return safely to their homes in Myanmar Iranian activities have condemned the death in prison of a leading Iranian environmentalist they say the death of. Me who'd had dual Canadian citizenship is part of a disturbing trend of suspicious deaths in custody the un Secretary General Antonio good terrorists has called for an immediate and unconditional easing of violence in Syria following Israeli airstrikes on Saturday Mr Gutierrez said he was closely following the alarming military escalation throughout Syria South Korea's prime minister has indicated that certain conditions need to be met before the country's president can accept an offer to meet the North Korean leader Kim Jong un the invitation came from Mr Kim Sr talks with South Korean president moon j n on Saturday. The Egyptian army says has killed 16 Islamist militants since a big anti terrorist operation was launched in Sinai on Friday a military statement said dozens of targets have been destroyed including weapons dump some vehicles 30 suspects were arrested the Chief Minister of India's biggest state or the very day says a 1000000 students have skipped this year's matriculation examinations following steps taken by his government to stop widespread cheating he said the sharp drop in numbers was a result of his administration's efforts to tackle those accused of corrupting the exam process b.b.c. News Hello I'm Doris Mitchell And this is our world technology program click today better artificial intelligence cloning our voices and how to build a replicant for the big screen Yes I'm chatting to the Oscar nominated visual effects behind the latest Blade Runner movie and I tell you what folks Mr Bill Thompson is back are you a replicant this is a test designed to provoke emotional response I built a replica of this is not a clone voice I have the Bill Thompson Wow awful pay extra for that yeah good to have you back Bill so 1st let's get a better idea these days of how babies learn and how even at the age of one a child's brain is way more powerful than the highest end computer Now that's a cup of the aspirations at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as it launches intelligence Quest is a huge initiative in human and machine intelligence we're going to hear a bit more from 2 of those who are behind it let's start with Daniela Ross who is director of MIT's Computer Science and artificial intelligence lap 1st of all Daniela What's the idea behind intelligence Quest and also the point why now. So intelligent Quest aims to develop the science and engineering of intelligence by connecting you know scientists and computer scientists and I would say that the science and engineering of intelligence is one of the most profound challenges we have today because understanding intelligence will give us the knowledge to understand ourselves and to create machines that will support us in cognitive and physical work and that this is really extraordinary exciting to address today because we have made so much progress on many fronts we have made progress on building capable computers that can constitute a lot of data we now have a lot of sources of information neuroscience is making progress we have new algorithms for machine learning it's a good times of bringing together expertise from Ai from machine learning from robotics from your science from brain and cognitive science to address questions that cuts across both fields and I'm glad you mentioned brain and cognitive sciences because indeed we have your colleague with us as well Jim to Carl a here is head of the department of brain and cognitive sciences over there and I guess part of this is I hinted in the introduction Jim is kind of reverse engineering we know that even at one year old of a child is way more powerful than the best computer possible to reverse engineer o. In a way in order to help improve the algorithms and indeed the machines. Yeah that's exactly right so I like that you use the term reverse engineering because that's the essence of this approach here of trying to bring an engineering approach to the science of how human intelligence works and you mentioned one of our moonshot projects of understanding what how how system might start like a baby and learn like a child and it be happy to elaborate on that but more broadly that the mission is Daniela pointed out is that we have this exciting time right now where there's a convergence of between science and engineering that we think is going to replenish the well of a algorithms among other things and it's quite an exciting time for a lot of the reasons that Daniela laid out the cost on a lot of the algorithms are based on you know they're quite historic that by Still ideas maybe from the fifty's and sixty's and why this reverse engineering might bring us a little bit more to Doug's. So a large body of working machine learning is in not good nor networks and in turn your networks are leveraging decades old ideas but I would say that there is a lot of other activity in the field that aims to to innovate that aims to bring new fresh ways thinking about what is machine learning and how we can identify patents and make predictions based on data based on physical simulations and models and so forth so as though there is that there is historical work that we are building on there is a lot of new work and there is the possibility of making a bridge to neuroscience that is very exciting it's a Bill Thompson It all sounds very multi-disciplinary to me I know that's a big point in bringing the neuroscience together with the computer scientists and many others it just has to be it has to bring in all of these because it is such a big area and it's something that has always fascinated me and I did a psychology degree university I did philosophy that psychology it part because I was so interested in these questions this was 35 years ago when some of these old algorithms you were talking about we developed by people at night one of my teachers Jeff hinted who did a lot of the work on back propagation of your networks the idea that we're now going to look for new approaches and new ways to take advantage of our engineering capability and give us better sightly to the way the brain works so we can start to construct artificial systems is I think very sensible we can't afford to take those old ideas or just keep building on that which brings us back to say a lot of the work that you do in the Deckard overlap Jim For instance the whole idea of exploring vision understanding vision say what is this party looking at the human visual cortex and how and then thinking how it can apply to machine vision. Yes that's right and in my lab work we work on visual processing and one of the key breakthroughs that happened is as was alluded to there we you know there was there was the intersection of engineering to neuro science and neuroanatomy that led to the some of the foundations of what are now the neural networks and you mention that's not just because they work in vision but it works like folks like Jeff Hinton of you mentioned and others that the took that approach from from cognitive science as well but so that got us to networks that are now approximating what you're you're in my visual system can do but that's just scratching the surface of the 1st level of visual intelligence there's so much more that our visual systems than our perceptual systems and then beyond that our cognition can do and those are the questions that my lab is working on beyond Now the initial vision that the people learning is essentially captured and replicated the next levels of intelligence even just visual intelligence is where we're where we're headed next and then you're done you know your the roboticist amongst us aren't you say your dream is very much to make human and machine interaction seamless as he puts his site just for this out a bit more and what you mean by that well so imagine a future where machines will adapt to people rather than the other way around today if you want to use a robot or a computer you have to learn the language of that machine now imagine a future where the much Sheens and people will be connected in seeing less ways where maybe machines could read our brain activity and decode it and understand exactly what we want where machines could understand what we say in spoken language and we are really not that far from making these kinds of breakthroughs and in your case Tim understanding intent for instance in autonomous vehicles and that's an important idea isn't it so it's not just trying to predict human behavior but even intent that sounds fascinating. Right so intent and just social structures in general are all part of the next level the system is that when I say the broader we are I mean the mit i.q. Effort to emulate those are the parts of that are not as you say built into current systems and you know we have reasonable perceptual systems now but those have to interface nicely with the entire lot of systems even talk about something like intent and that's what's quite exciting is that that's an area section between neuroscience and cognitive science and machine learning and done it Gail which is why you need engineering and that's what we're looking at now and that's that that's why it's a very exciting time for this there's multi-disciplinary intersection you have to see it's also crucially section with philosophy because the question of tension of the nature of tension is one of the core questions there which you could start to address would you try to try to build machines that have intention to him. Sorry I didn't quite catch that yeah those making a point about intention but just for time let's just move on so I did want to go back stand here and ask about this concept of the core and the bridge you know you've got these 2 big prongs as part of this initiative that they settle much like the titles of the in banks novels or something but what do you mean by the core and the bridge briefly So the core is basically an effort focused on understanding human intelligence and driving and use that machine intelligence algorithms and it's really up to him and see the basic science and the basic engineering and the bridge will connect these new algorithms to other disciplines to empower other disciplines in their knowledge discovery Ok that's nice and concise and Danielle you've already answered this question for I was going to ask what will it mean for our lives this research that you're doing over there you've already said it's going to improve the way that we work with machines in the machines will adapt better to human beings what about you then Jim some of this might sound a bit Terek Why does this matter in our lives. Well so discovering how human intelligence works or how the human brain works in the language of Engineers Well we've been talking about Ai and algorithms and it will certainly impact that and that's a big part of what we're talking about today but understanding the brain engineering terms we're all through illuminating new approaches for helping those who are blind out 5 to 6 gets a phrenic have learning disabilities memory loss if we have an engineering description of a system then we can see new ways to repair it educated perhaps even augment our own minds so that that's the larger view of why understanding the mind and intelligence and engineering terms is really quite exciting even beyond attentional transformative Ok we'll leave it there that's Jim De Carlo and Danielle iris at mit talking about intelligence quest and it's all happening over there mit because actually Eric Schmidt I read of Google fame recently of Google fame has just been announced as a visiting innovation fan I know that this is quick from the b.b.c. In London I'm Gareth Mitchell with Bill Thompson but is it really me Gareth and is it really Bill Thompson I mean might we be sophisticated voice synthesisers programs by a malevolent entity to spoof you now if I had posed that question if you years ago it would have seemed rather absurd but the dangers of voice spoofing are increasingly real as we add ever closer to authentic sounding human speech now there are dangers for sure but what about the upsides of capturing and then synthesising your voice princes in cases where illness threatens to rob you of the ability to speak voice banking is a technology where you can record samples of your voice and it can be reconstructed years later when our reporter Jack Meagan has been investigating the latest in the world of voice claiming and his report starts with Dr Matthew a that he's Chief Scientific Scientific Officer I have to get my speech that this is a bit better than this chief scientific officer of the speech synthesis company Sarah proc so speech synthesis is a technology which takes text and turns it into a course you would record a speaker for a long time. Time and then you would use that Odio to generate the voice so when you listen to for example lexer on Amazon there is some of the Sounds like a lecture in real life so that technology of taking people's voices and copying it has been around for a long time what has changed is it used to be quite hard to do this process so you would have to get someone into a recording studio for a long long time you'd have to ask them to record a specific text so you could then generate any content you want to this is gradually got Asian easier we need less audience so you need less formal text to generate other output so gradually as years progressed ability to copy people's voices and use it for up whatever purposes you want has accelerated the moment voice calling technology appeared some argue that this was a gift to fake news and open to abuse but alongside this Matthew Ellis company summer product I worked closely with the medical community to help those who can no longer speak. So should we look at this as a more positive or negative development Dr Dominic what is a senior lecturer and leading academic in forensic speech science at the University of York I think the development of voice clothing overall I would use that as a positive thing in the sense that it can be used for very benign purposes like for example somebody with motor neuron disease who is losing the ability to speak if that person's voice can be modeled such that after the person leaves they really think to speak they can use our voice of the size or which produces speech that actually sounds like that you know that's a way of helping them to retain their state of their identity on the other hand as with so many new technologies the potential for misuse is correspondingly quite great and we can see that in the wrong hands voice quoting techniques could be used for fraudulent purposes voice cloning technology is improving all the time indeed last year developers used a video of former u.s. President Barack Obama to show how video and audio could be manipulated so that he appeared to say something he did not say with some papers calling it the future of fake news. So what about that could this be used to put words in people's mouths or even used as an excuse by those caught saying something they shouldn't do number one a man and we understand from them somehow mag. Alone with his Dominic Well it's very it's a margin that that person could see there were steps not somebody has made their way through the recording I didn't actually think it was words the next logical step using voice calling techniques is to insert sections modify words that people have said and it becomes very difficult for me to speak that because the great advantage of that it all so you don't think technology is that it's possible to cover up the joint Matthew a little grease that technology being misused is a problem but that the technology is not the concern the issue with fake news wasn't so much that the article was convincing but the ability to distribute it to everybody was actually more important so I think it's true that as the technology improves people will get more skeptical about this when we get to a stage where you're able to manipulate all g.-o. And video to the point where you can make completely convincing films of people saying and doing things that they haven't done. But that's a long way off still at the end of 2016 Adobe's Photoshop for voice project vocal and Google deep mines where you've net were announced so with commercial applications on the horizon with millions of potential users what does Matthew Aylett think the future holds for voice cloning of course is a really special our voice is a part of ourselves almost like our souls when we speak it betrays our motions on turtle state how we feel where we're from and everything we want to use computers we want season in social conditions for them to be able to speak is very important and to allow people to have their own personalized voices if they lose their voice is very important and potentially even allowing people to have extensions of themselves where they have systems which use their voice and extends their personality outside that is something which is kind of fun and interesting so in reality I think this technology Office lot more opportunities then and problems and I think as always it's down to what the law is and how people decide whether something is true and. That's Jack Meagen reporting and listening to that was built on so well we believe it was Jack really by placidly take a couple of days off or just got somebody else to voice that artificially you could call tell them there except of course you will be able to tell it heads of forensic analysis of generated voices will always be able to distinguish them from the full voice so the fundamental issue you know you'll be able to be faked so plausibly the every will believe it was really you I don't think that will arise there will be contexts where people want to spread misinformation disinformation probably God when it will have some impact that will certainly happen but actually I do I do with the perspective the benefits of being able to do this for people who have lost their voice do outweigh those. Risks that we can lead to cope with the possibility we've led to cope with the possibility that photographs could be related well learned to cope with the possibility the video to be will it play to the dead if you see the recent for Russia are already over the fact you can do real time face mapping on to video so you could put some of your is headed to someone else's body while that body does things that the head but not approved be done with Donald Trump It has to be done in lots of different contexts where we have to do the voice and we will find better to deal with it but what really matters to be is that those people who do want to keep their voice and be able to use a voice you have to do that and also that you know if you want to go away on holiday for 3 or 4 weeks of your to type it by call beds and have them automatically generated it by voice sitting here you won't need to bring anybody else replacement so I have a secure role in the studio Exactly and I can type in things like Gareth your brilliance that you say in your voice but you never that Gareth you're brilliant you did it that's been recorded that's handy that's my new ring tone Ok so what about say going from this whole idea of synthetic voices and me being bearable him being made goodness knows what else is going on how about going to artificial humans replicants passing themselves off as real people yes indeed it sounds like something out of Blade Runner I was walking or watching was at school this was a test. We were difficult to spot that she likes. Oh. This after. She's trying to provoke him. It isn't degrading being asked personal questions that's one thing. Poor enjoy your work after. Christmas to watch for. From Blade Runner 2049 that's Ryan Gosling k a blade runner himself and we heard their love and there they are grappling with the idea of desire yes very human if you like now one scene that really jumped out at me was with 2 of the main female characters joy played by Anna in the movie she's a hologram and she gets merged in this particular scene with a physical character called Mariette so Mariette emerges and dissolves into joy and then joy into Mariette and at times they overlap now as the Oscar announcements back and I've been finding out more about that scene from the visual effects supervisor on the movie Paul Lambert of double negative has an Academy nomination in the visual effects category he's been hotly tipped to win that he and his team and it actually been talking me through how that scene came together and 1st how the actors separately played that scene to the camera we also captured those performances with 5 with this camera's eye small Go Pros and sometimes small Sony cameras that were placed throughout the set so that we could see the performances from different angles and for those different angles we were then able to work out where in space the 2 actresses were so that we could then make see 2 versions of them to then have their bodies overlap each other we had to move Joy's performance so that every now and then you get a moment where their eyes lined up or their mouths lined up and the underlying thing which we really want to keep was both characters to come in and out of sync was that it just flowed a lot better so so what we would do is subtly change and as performance so that she got bored to sit there like she came out it's one thing about join the hologram was that she was affected by her environment she gets shadows cast on her and she also call shadows so when not you have 2 actresses in the same space shot separately rather liked. Needs to produce shadows come in from Mariette to joy and joy to Mariette and that's actually quite complex to actually pull off so there's a lot of preparation work so you have this character called Joy and she's one of the main characters and in the movie she's a hologram so on screen you need to make her kind of look virtual but she needs real presence as well and that must be such a challenge when it comes to the visual effects the director wanted the audience to believe that she was a real girl but then also had to be times when like he wanted to convey Ok she's not actually real she is actually a hologram and it couldn't be too much of an effect because it would take a movie because there are times when she cries and she has a real emotive performance and she moves you then suddenly register that she's actually hollow inside and she's not actually there and I love the costumes of course this being the future quite a few of the costumes light up and they have panels that are luminescent and I was quite surprised to find out that they did this on sets with smart materials with panels of any D's and so on and I seemed a lot of those effects would be put on afterwards in post-production So why did that go to the wardrobe department rather than you guys in the visual effects department there is very much a push nowadays to like if you can get in camera to actually do that and then you will focus as a tool rather than like the guiding principle for your movie and finally then what about the technology that you actually use are you talking about huge computing clusters sending off the massive render farms or can you do a whole lot of on your laptop these days. Some of our city work is an incredible amount of geometry you know like and we put like a lot of detail in there now you only really get to see the detail when you are a little bit closer to the objects because basically we had to add atmosphere and snow and rain there are times when there are billions of polygons it in those scenes but one of the things which actually took the longest to run though was the rain or the snow or the atmospherics because traditionally you can get away with rendering rain it basically is like a foreground background but we can really do this of this one just because the atmosphere played such an important part in the look and and also because it's so dark and dingy you would actually register those lights around lights and stuff and that the cameras always made it so you know we actually decided to to do like a fully retraced version of the rain and the snow there were times where there were where like it took a couple of days to actually read us so that you know she got to see that as a pass only after 2 days of render it suddenly added a certain level of Realtors and which was definitely needed because like this movie was all about the dark and did you world which 3049 that I've become you know like sometimes a grants of us knows and sometimes has to do doing that at the same time but there was always this low hanging in the atmospheric dial and did you look at that you never saw Pretty of estate you could never see into the distance even though like we had this a massive amount of data out you could see this these are it this is but you can see it whenever we flew by like something so that pretty close but yeah it's yes you could read of that on your normal laptop for sure but not yet anyway that's poll number so. Giving us based both of the movie but also what about that seems very interesting isn't it this threesome real holographic joy it's. Incredibly well as a piece or sort of out there and if you watch it. The point about a film like Blade Runner is that if you start thinking about how do they do this then you're not in the story and so they might as well not have bothered and so to hear Paul talking about it is great because after the event I want to understand it because when he's talked about that it is fascinating to particular pre-shared how they lost the sink from time to time to make you is the viewer aware of that and also how the 3 actors responded separately that's arrived also as Kay responding to the slippage between joy and Mariette was as much a part of your emotional response that scene where the sort of melding of the the the woman who emerges is part of both of them as it were and that was all fascinating Now I know how difficult it was I could appreciate it even more but if I watch the film again I would hope I would be thinking about that it's like the point the poor later way said we fully re traced or every raindrop and all the snow to say those few words the enormity of that understatement Yeah exactly but of course it works and increasingly with films particularly so high in science fiction films we expect this and of course we're also starting to expect it in every other film because fakes there in films looks fake. Where is the re traced it Bladerunner did not if I was breaking your suburban comedy with snow seeded it odd what right trace was it better the snow I could get from the machine on and is remarkable scenes where the flakes of snow land on Joy's hands and she becomes aware of her senses you know yes or no and all of that really just just builds up into the cerebral experience so when it comes back to it you talk about reports of voice as well but we are reaching the point where it's not just photo real you know it's better than reality it is certainly much more controlled with reality we still need to distinguish these fictions from the reality I hope we can continue to do so in the future and you guys that by going to 24 to 9 available to download and build something that you very much indeed for that I'm Gareth Mitchell the producer's calling Grant I will be back next week see that I can buy. But I'm always ice development associate. 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On from our own correspondent after the news doesn't you know reveal or hide Poland's history what do the words the Polish nation mean do they refer to the country as a whole or can they also apply to Poles who took part in the persecution of Jews the minister said no the images Afghans can't erase pointing at his eye he tells me it has seen a lot of trauma his smile disappears and when the violence and has my mind I see nothing else and the South Korean soap operas now big in Ethiopia t.v. Here used to be so boring or the Channel show mainly news one out of some of our residents in her twenties told me but karma is pure entertainment and people really like it all that and why one correspondent wasn't allowed into some last rites at a Hindu temple that's from our own correspondent with me Prescott hasa after this bulletin Hello I'm Gerri Smith with the b.b.c. News South Korea's prime minister has indicated that certain conditions need to be met.