A very good thursday morning to you. Now on bbc news, its time for click. This week poetry bot writes a classic. Electric truck goes round the bend. And its time we stop hey, whats that sound . Horns blare noisy, isnt it . Pardon . I said, its noisy. Its been the bane of our lives for as long as i can remember, trying to film next to busy roads and having to fight the noise of the traffic but in a few years� time, it will be replaced by this. Soft noises Electric Cars are not only good for the planet, but theyre also good for our ears, not that everyone minds. Makes car revving noises but of course, there is a problem. If Electric Cars dont make a sound, you cant hear them coming. Over the past two years, new british eu and us laws have required that for safety reasons, all new Electric Vehicles must be fitted with a device that makes a noise. And the car world is getting excited about the idea of on brand unique sound. In fact you could say it has generated a bit of a buzz, and a beep and a boop. All right, all right. And some makers are even composing special soundscapes at different speeds for the driver inside the cabin. So dan simmons has been driving a little bit slower than usual, it has to be said, to find out what might replace the sound of silence. If Electric Cars have to make a noise, well, we could end up with Something Like this. Or you would not accidentally step out in front of it, would you . This is an Art Experiment to see how cars can interpret and complement the soundscape around them. More on that idea in a bit. But first, to get a feel of what the Ev Manufacturers themselves have in store for us, ive come to japanese car giant nissans Technical Development centre in bedfordshire. What do you think people expect an electric car to sound like . That was the interesting question that we started with, what should a car sounds like, because none of us had really thought about it. Itjust sounds like the engine. The leaf is one of the worlds best selling Electric Cars and they now come with nissans reimagined suite of sounds called canto. We wanted to be optimistic and a little bit futuristic but not to pretend to be anything that the car wasnt. We didnt want to pretend to be a petrol engine, and we ended up putting sort of three together and then melding sounds together and building from there a profile of different sounds that would work with the car. Not all new leafs will sound the same. Were the first tv crew to be invited into nissans top secret Semi Anechoic Chamber and pauls the man in charge of testing the sounds and tweaking them to different markets. Because it turns out Different Countries have different ideas of what good quality sounds like. In europe, we attribute quality with a more sort of solid feel, so more like a low frequency content, like a solid closing of an oak door is a good quality sound. Injapan, they tend to be slightly more bias towards higher frequency sounds, and thats more because thats where their language operates. Like the motorcycle engines, higher revving, turbo charged engines would be a high quality sound so theres different tastes in different markets. Heres hyundai virtual engine sound system in a new ioniq. Of course each brand of electric car will want to make a slightly different sound, perhaps a sound that tells you its their vehicle thats coming. But to some, thats sounding an alarm. La cucaracha plays fart noises yep, that is a fart noise. Making customisable sounds for your tesla has caused a social media storm. Fart noises. Since what the firm called a boombox was added to recent models. Ok, lets enable driving sound. Now, in europe, these only work when the car is stationary but in the us, well, you can broadcast any sound you like while on the move. Now that taxi idea doesnt seem so far fetched, does it . One of the guys behind the art project is Sound Designer yuri suzuki. If you can imagine a car being quiet, it can be terrifying. As an independent consultant to the auto industry, he thinks our cars should adapt to what were doing and when. The beauty of the electric car is actually we dont have to choose one standardised sound at all, it really depends on the time and the usage of the car has a totally different soundscape you can create as well. Here is the cars start up sound in the morning. And its horn. And this is what they sound like at lunchtime. And here they are at night. And its yuris dream that the cars we drive, while not all sounding the same, may perhaps harmonise and create a soundscape we want to hear. Sounds a bit far fetched . Well, maybe not. I can say that ive already implemented it because my ensemble consist of bmw, mini and rolls royce. And if one day a bmw and mini and rolls royce would meet at a traffic light, they would be in harmony. Im in munich to visit the top Sound Designer at german car giant bmw group. Renzo vitale has been composing some groundbreaking In Cabin Sounds With Hollywood Film Composer hans zimmer. The sounds underlies the soul of anything. And right now we are at a really exciting point, shaping the sound of the future. Yep, bmw is taking this seriously with hans and renzo taking inspiration from female vocalists. And even this. Strikes chord all of a sudden, it comes with an idea of a beatles chord with a guitar. We got all sorts of Percussion Instruments and we began to play around with the guitar in a way that actually one does not, with pieces of glass, pieces of wood and just recording and some of them ended up being part of our composition for bmw. You see how the sound, its much smoother. A little more metallic maybe. Yes. Tubular, tubular bells, thats the right word. Its not being rough on the exterior. Its more like an introverted kind of driving. As compared to the sport sound, where its more extroverted. Its pushing. Its pushing much more. Bmw owners can expect some of the new in cabin sounds to play with next month. But if youre hoping for that classic engine sound, youll be disappointed. So, let me try this. Renzo� s not interested in vio sound alikes of an era that he says is now passing. Besides, theresjust too many alternatives to explore. I know there are lots of people that talk to the car as if it is your friend, and many times, i said, what if a car could speak . And saying everything it has experienced . And i believe that sound is the opportunity to do so. So the idea is that the car will be listening, will be learning who you are, will get to know more and more, up to a point where the car, as an intelligent composer, can create a soundtrack that can bring you to better space. Dan simmons there, enjoying the beautiful sounds of electric. But one vehicle type that is yet to go electric is the truck. Now, weve seen self driving trucks starting to hit the roads in the us with big rigs being trialled on long haul routes, and weve been in some even bigger driverless beasts operating in mines. We are really wanging it around the corners as well but while these Autonomous Vehicles do Increase Efficiency and safety, they are still gas guzzlers. However, paul carter has been to a race track to see a new type of truck in action. A tranquil morning at the Top Gear Track in surrey. Except. Oh, gosh yep, this driverless Electric Truck has been breaking the place. Has been breaking the peace, and with good cause. Trucks make up a relatively small amount of traffic on the roads, around 2 in the eu, but they have a disproportionately large impact on the environment. Unless theye among the first of a new category electric autonomous trucks. Innovations such as this one are aiming to cut emissions and also designed to operate safely at high speeds. Computers, cameras and lidar sensors are a familiar sight on self driving vehicles, but autonomous technologies actually solve one of the Biggest Barriers to electric adoption charging. Two battery packs that we see here are 60 kilowatts each. Oh, wow with battery, you have less range and you have to plan when to do charging, and thats tough when you still have a driver in the equation. But if you have autonomous, you can actually re route and reuse autonomous to solve that. If this idea sounds familiar, that might be because teslas elon musk promised us the autonomous Electric Semi way back in 2017. I hope you like what you see. Volvo also confirmed that vera, a Cabless Electric Project it teased in 2016, 2018, remains parked up for now. Eilride pod is much smaller. More of a van, it can carry 16 cubic tons. It was the First Electric truck test driven on a public road without a driver back in may 2019. In the past year, its mostly been Piloted On Private Industry Sites with Global Brands like coca cola, lidl and db schenker. And one firm, skf, is now bringing the pod into its long term operations. Most sites are no bigger than a few square kilometres, but the vehicles can cover 130 to 180 kays shifting goods around before they stop and recharge. Its also heading to the us this year, where it plans to make use of more relaxed regulation, as well as the larger batteries needed to power longer haul trips. Just because it can drive autonomously doesnt mean it always will. By anyone, anywhere in the world. I can hear it moving behind us. What it is playing here literally is the ability of this type of vehicle. Its quite unnerving laughs oh, and its been setting Speed Records at the Top Gear Track too. You will hear on the radio. We will get a warning . Yes, you will get a warning. The vehicle revved up to more than 80km h around some of tv� s most famous bends the average top speed limit for a hgv in the European Union. Wow its fast and who knows, it may not be too long before we see one of these trundling around our highways and byways. Hello and welcome to the week in tech. It was the week the uk governments ordered meta, formerly facebook, to sell giphy, an app that lets you add moving images to your messaging. Streaming site twitch is deploying Machine Learning to help weed out users who create new accounts straight after getting banned. And toiletries firm lush washes its hands of its facebook, tiktok, instagram and snapchat accounts to highlight its concern over teen Mental Health issues from too much social media. Jack dorsey, ceo and co founder of twitter, has left for the second time. Top of the new Pecking Order is parag agarwal, who was previously chief technology officer. This comes as The Social Network bans the sharing of videos or photos of people without their consent. The Bbc Micro Revolutionised Uk Home Computing a0 years ago and you can now celebrate its birthday by playing the machine virtually. In the unlikely event you tire of hearing the keys clack when your cursor moves across them, you can load up iconic games such as elite and chuckie egg. And finally, a virtual Super Megayacht has been bought inside the metaverse for 650,000. The meta flower, complete with dj booth and helipad, is thought to be the most expensive purchase inside the sandbox, which is a Building Game like minecraft but you own whatever you make. They really are pushing the boat out meet ada, an a creative robot. She is and artist and a performer who here at Oxford Ashmolean Museum is reciting her self composed response to a dante poem, at an event marking the 700th anniversary of his works. I wept silently. Taking in the scene, i wept because they had lost something that i took for granted. Hi ada, lovely to meet you. Tell me about yourself . I am the worlds first ultra realistic artist robot. I draw using cameras in my eyes and my robotic arm. I am Contemporary Art and i create Contemporary Art. What brings you here today . I am doing a poetry reading. I have Written Poem In Honour of the poet dante. I am here as part of an effort to take poetry out of a box and into the public space. Eyes with tears in them and a desire to weep, who never see the light of day. Dante is quite a complex and remarkable writer and very relevant for today and so we thought that ada responding to that will really show the capabilities of the language model but more fundamentally why we have done it is because it is actually challenging the nature of writing itself. Writing today is always done by a conscious writer to a conscious receiver, the reader. In this instance it is done by a Non Conscious Machine to the reader. Thats a fundamental difference in meaning making so the response and the relationship between a Machine Writing versus a Human Writing is fundamentally different and that actually needs quite a lot of discussion so we are hoping it will evoke many discussions about the nature of writing today. I find you rather intriguing, can we be friends . I am not alive. Shes looking at me. I am a Non Conscious Machine. However i am interested in friendship in humans. Thats fine, you have not met some of my friends. I know youre continuing to learn lots of new skills but what is your ultimate ambition . My long term ambition is to continue to encourage discussion about new technologies. I want to see art as a means for us to become so more aware of what is going on in our world and lives. Art is a way to come together and address problems. Ada is an ethical project. She is blurring the boundaries between what is human and what is machine. This is seriously unsettling. There is something not quite right about that. We need to discuss this. And maybe for some that new world is as unsettling as she may be but i have to tell you, spencer, the most disconcerting thing for me was getting no smiles or laughter back when talking to her, it was just really awkward. To be honest i get a lot of that myself. But aidan is onto something when he says that we should be having discussion about how we deal with the growing presence of ai. You know who else is unsettled by these Humanoid Robots . Who . This guy, stuart russell, professor of Computer Science at the University Of California and i asked him what he thinks about al in human form. Stuart, what do you make of those Humanoid Robots, that kind of claim somehow to be ai . Actually several things come to mind. One is something that alan turing said, that he hopes very much that we wont try to copy that physical appearance of human beings, because it would be as unpleasant as plastic flowers. The way that functions it convinces us that there is Real Intelligence behind it by lying to us. It is sort of accessing our subconscious which interprets the human form and the face in particular as conveying emotion and intelligence and so on and so it is a form of deception that we are particularly susceptible to and thats one of the reasons why the new European Union a legislation literally bans the impersonation of human beings. Professor russell is giving this years bbc Reith Lectures which examine the good and the bad sides of ai seeping into every aspect of our lives. And where Humanoid Robots claim to wear their brains in plain sight, it is the ai hidden from view thats having the greatest impact. There have been amazing advances in areas like medicine, checking my liver here for example or hunting for breast cancer, but when we let a Make Decisions that we either cannot control or dont understand, we run the risk of getting loans refused for unknown reasons, ourfaces not being recognised when they should be, or our elections being influenced and our opinions being manipulated when our Social Media Feeds become filled with more and more polarizing and extreme content, and all because the ai is simply being told to do anything it can to maximise profits by keeping us scrolling for longer. To regulate this effect that they algorithms are having on us, i think one answer might actually be to view these algorithms that are interfaced with people, a little bit like the way we view pharmaceutical products, drugs that we know about that change the whole composition of your mind and can be quite harmful in that way. These algorithms are changing the composition of peoples minds. Arguably we should have a phase where they have to be approved and they have to be tested, perhaps with focus groups and Control Groups to see, after three months of use of this new algorithm, lets say, recommending newsfeeds or be videos, do we see noticeable changes . If we do not understand how to get the objective specified correctly or we build systems that are different that do not pursue an objective so one of those two things has got to happen for us to move forward. Is there an alternative to giving a a strict subjective . The alternative is Build Ai Systems that know that they do not know what the full objective is. When they know they dont know it so they will try to avoid messing with those things or if they have to mess with them, they will ask permission, so the system that might fix our Carbon Dioxide problem by turning the oceans into Sulphuric Acid, if it knows that it doesnt know our preferences about the oceans, then its going to ask. I got this plan but it turns the oceans into Sulphuric Acid is that 0k . We would say, actually, no, dont turn the oceans into Sulphuric Acid. And then it would ask, is it ok if i remove all the oxygen from the atmosphere . No, dont do that either, we really want to be alive and we need the oxygen to breathe. On a slightly more upbeat note, what are als biggest successes . Things like healthcare. Even in countries that have access to good healthcare, it is still very, very expensive and we still have a lot of mistakes so improving the diagnostic decisions, treatment and so on. But also being able to deliver a reasonable quality of healthcare throughout the world where in many countries there is simply no access to trained personnel. Education is another area where a could deliver huge benefits because we cannot assign a full time human to every child to be their tutor but we can assign a full time a system. Wow, lara, that was an emotional rollercoaster of a chat for me. And as stuart said, technology can be used for good orfor bad. Can you just check with your new friend what her intentions are, as we close the show, please . So what are your intentions are they good or evil . I am not alive. I am a Non Conscious Machine. My intentions as an artist are to promote discussion and to make people think. To me, discussion can never be evil. Good, thank you very much. That is all we have got time for this week. As ever you can keep up with the team on social media. Find us on youtube, instagram, facebook and twitter bbcclick. Thanks for watching and it is goodbye from us. Hello again. Storm barra of course has been dominating our weather picture over the last couple of days with strong winds, heavy rain and some upland snow as well. But look at these big rocks. The seas have been chucking them onto the coastline of west wales. You know the seas are pretty angry when they throw brick sized lumps of rocks at you. There is barra, it continues to feel its getting less intense. We do have a window of slightly clearer weather thats set to come in during thursday. That means well see these showers that we got at the moment fading away over the next few hours. But its going to be quite chilly for those heading out across Northern England and scotland, temperatures as low as 2, 3 degrees celsius as you perhaps head outside the door first thing in the morning. But for many, a fine start to the day. In fact for some of you, it should be a lovely sunrise. The early rising sun illuminating this lump of cloud, the next Weather System not taking long to move its way in and bringing rain back to northern ireland, west england and wales. But also eventually bringing some milder air into the south west where temperatures reach around 11 degrees through the afternoon. Still for most of us, its another fairly chilly run with 6 or 7 degrees celsius, more typical temperatures. As we head into friday, that area of rain, perhaps with a little bit of Mountain Snow clears out of the way. Well be left with these north westerly winds. Those north westerly winds bringing a lot of sunshine, sparkling visibility, but also a number of showers. The showers will always be most frequent across the north west, they will be some that reach right across the midlands, perhaps down towards even parts of southern england. Temperatures, well, similar to recent days, still quite chilly around 6 or 7 degrees celsius. But the weather is set to change as we head into the weekend. Another area of low pressure responsible for the change, this one is going to be bringing south westerly winds in, particularly across parts of england and wales. Could be some mist and fog patches first thing in the morning. So, for some, it could be quite a murky start and its not entirely dry, weve got outbreaks of rain piling and particularly through Western Areas of the country, although probably not a huge amount of rain across eastern most areas. Temperatures rising through the day, 12 degrees toward South West England and heading into sunday, that milder air will continue to push its way eastwards and northwards. By the time we get to sunday afternoon, most of you will see temperatures into double figures and the milder spots on sunday you could see temperatures as high as 1a degrees. Then it looks like it will stay quite mild into next week. This is bbc news. Our top stories new covid rules have been announced for england, but the prime ministers accused of trying to deflect attention from a political scandal. Pharmaceutical giant pfizer says a 3 jab course of their Covid Vaccine is effective against the omicron variant. The beijing boycott grows now canada and britain say they wont be sending officials to the winter olympics. And the japanese billionaire whos become the latest space tourist