Its geek versus geek as spen meets fry. And lots of people shout in a big tent. Summer is on the way and, well, it wouldnt be a british summer without a visit to a good Old Fashioned festival. No, not that one. Much better. Known as the town of books, hay on wye in wales is the location of the hay festival. Its a literary mecca, an annual gathering of artists, authors, daleks and, yep, even royals. Its even been called the woodstock of the mind by none other than former us president bill clinton. This year its the 30th hay festival, and the line up is pretty stellar. Well, for the second year in a row, weve been invited to share some of our favourite experiences and show off some really good tech, all in front of a real, Live Audience of actual people. What could possibly go wrong . A packed tent waited, all that we had to do was wow them applause we had robots falling over, experiments in Haptic Feedback and demos in binaural sound, but that was nothing compared to the climax a click created wavy, shouty game built using Artificial Intelligence. More on that later in the show. In the meantime, it cant have have escaped your attention that around the uk things are getting a touch political. As the general election looms, those politicians are using increasingly sophisticated techniques in order to learn more about us. The Advertising Reach of facebook has long been an open secret, but now its something the Political Parties are getting in on too. In fact, both the Trump Campaign and the leave. Eu groups credited facebook as being a vital part of their electioneering. We know that the personal details that you give to Social Networks allow them to send you relevant, targeted content, and it goes much deeper thanjust your basic demographics. There are now Data Analytics companies claiming to be able to micro target and micro tweak messages for individual readers, playing to their biases and fears. If you know the personality of the people youre targeting, you can nuance your messaging to resonate more effectively with those key audience groups. Whats also emerging is that Political Parties have been using this data to reach potential voters on a very granular level. So who is being targeted on facebook and how . Well, until now, theres been nothing around to analyse any of this, but the Snap General Election galvanised Louis Knight Webb and sam jeffers to develop who targets me, a plug in to tell each of us how were being targeted. When you install the plug in for the first time, it asks for your age, your gender and your location, and then it starts scouring your facebook feed looking for adverts with a political message. So once youve installed the plug in, it works in the background to extract the whole advert that you see on your newsfeed. So it pulls out the headline, the subtitle, any related videos, any images, any links. We also get the reaction so how many likes, how many comments, how many shares so we can see which messages are getting the most traction. Are they particularly clandestine messages, are they slightly subversive, are they even fake news . But how do Data Companies get the information in the first place . A lot of the quizzes you fill out on facebook or, you know, you open a survey, it asks your facebook profile to connect to it. Sometimes youll notice that theres a lot of permissions attached and as soon as you click yes, all of your data is mined, and its then sold on to data brokers who then, eventually, sell it to the Political Parties for use in their campaigns. Although Facebook Says it doesnt sell our information on, data brokers can overlay any details they mine from the site with other datasets that they have on people based on their Email Addresses. The next step after that, of course, is to find similar users that are using facebook and then target adverts from that advertiser that supplied the Email Addresses to those users. Why did you choose facebook . It was a really wide demographic. There are just some people that you dont find on twitter. The very nature of the fact that i cant see your adverts, you cant see my adverts means that this approach had to be applied to facebook. Its where the problem was. Its a first of its kind anywhere in the world on this scale, giving us citizens some transparency into what were being shown, but how much can it really tell us . Do you think that people wouldnt know that certain things are adverts if they werent using your software . A lot of the time people are scrolling through facebook and the adverts fit into this weird intersection of Friend Endorsement and advertising. Its quite easy to miss the adverts on facebook. So far, who targets me has some 6,700 users in 620 constituencies, and its rising as we near polling day. On the down side, its only as good as the data its managed to crowd source, so it isnt necessarily representative, and it also doesnt work with mobile facebook, but the results are interesting. So were seeing a mixture of two things. Were seeing, firstly, a b testing, which is where i try out two different messages with the same group. I see which one gets the best reaction and then i pursue that message. Were also seeing targeting, which is where i pick a particular demographic of people, and then i send a message thats tailored to them. So, for example, it might be young people targeted with register to vote. The data from who targets me is also being poured over by analysts at the London School of economics. One aspect of their research is collecting dark posts, ads which are here one day and gone the next. It gives us the ability to create a respository of those dark posts. So if promises are being made on facebook in ads which will disappear the day after you use them, we should be able to go back to those after the election, look at them, evaluate them and maybe discuss them in the cold light of day. And the irony is that, as we demand more transparency from public bodies, the whole basis of political propaganda could be on the brink of a revolutionary change. Whats interesting, i think, about the new environment is the potentialfor using paid advertising and other techniques to create individual propaganda bubbles around individual voters. And thats not about controlling the market as a whole, but its about using smart targetting which, in a sense, creates such a compelling and Overarching Information Environment for individual people that that in some ways constrains what they do and controls what they do. I think thats why some academic commentators and others are beginning to think some of this is a bit spooky. But politicians arent the only ones with facebook on their minds. The social network was one of many topics on the very large brain of National Treasure and tech geek stephen fry. I met up with him after he gave a lecture at the hay festival highlighting how he thinks the world is being changed by social media, ai and automation. The very current conversation is whether facebook and platforms like them should actually be considered publishers, should they take responsibility for what ends up on the site . They are aware there is a problem, a serious problem. If 80 , some people have said, is the, you know, proportion of people who get their news from facebook rather than from mainstream media, then surely it is incumbent upon someone who is providing 80 of their news sources to make sure that those news sources are not defamatory, blatant lies, propaganda, the wrong kind of, you know, insulting. I would posit there that a publisher is responsible for all the people that generate the content. Yeah. They are employed by that publisher and facebook is clearly not that. Yeah. So do we need a third definition, a third thing . Exactly. I think there is a medium sort of definition that its not beyond the wit of lawyers of the right kind to find that. Everyone knows you are a famous early adopter. You seem to try everything that comes out . Well, yeah, im perpetually driven by curiosity. It may even be a kind of addictive greed, which is a sort of rather graver example of the Consumer Greed that we all share, really. Maybe im just more of a jackdaw, who likes shiny things and ijust. I still lust for them, i still love the unboxing. I still love the, you know, the first kind of. I get short of breath, and i pant slightly. Your presentation was a warning that people should prepare for the changes that are coming, for example, Artificial Intelligence and automation. I said that it was a sort of transformation of the workplace rather than. You know, its an obsolescence of certain types ofjob, but that doesnt mean forced redundancy of millions of workers. I mentioned one of the pleasing things about al and robotics, and that is whats known as moravecs paradox, which is that what were incredibly bad at, as individuals, machines tend to be very good at. Complicated sums, rapid and incredible access of memory from a database of a kind that we could never do, sorting and swapping of information and cataloguing and things like that. But things we can do without even thinking, like walk across the room or pick up a glass and have a sip of water, machines are hopeless at that. But thats fine, because we dont want them to do that for us. Where it gets difficult is in medium sort of service jobs, i think. Stephen fry, what is intelligence . Well, you could go the etymological route, and you could say it is a means to read into. Legere is read and inter, and thats pretty good, actually, reading into things. In other words, pattern recognition. Just being able to see connections in things, and people are talking about the moment that we arrive at agi, artificial general intelligence, and thats when the various types of pattern recognition, you know, numbers, data, you know, certain faces and things like that, they all come together so that they can be intelligent across these different things. If youve got an Artificial Intelligence thats good at that and another one thats good at that and you get enough of them, and then you put something on top that goes, oh, you want to know about a language problem, ill dial up that one. You want to know about walking and recognising objects, ill dial up that one. Surely, just a collection of specialists of intelligences under one umbrella is a generals intelligence. It doesnt have to be a breakthrough, itjust has to be a collection of specialists. Yes. I think youre very right, spencer. I think thats very likely to be the way it goes. Part of our intelligence, a huge part, is our emotional intelligence. Einstein would say he did say the same thing. Its notjust the cerebral power, it is something to do with our blends of fury, inquisitive desire, impatience, curiosity. These are very, very much more primal and much harder to reduce to a table of calculations and memories. But maybe you give it something else, some other kind of instinct to do things. Its reward is similar to our reward system, which is really chemical, isnt it . Its tryptophan and serotonin and endorphins of various kinds that reward us and then we have a pain system to deter us, and theres nothing to stop us giving that to a machine. Stephen, thank you so much for your time. Such a pleasure. Thank you for having us at your place. And keep clicking, i love it. Thank you. Welcome to the week in tech. It was the week where android creator andy rubin launched his own smartphone. Co founder of google larry page had a couple of novices take his kitty hawk flyer for a spin. And intel popped swing sensing chips into bats for the icc champions cup. Now, whenever you go into a church you expect to see a man of god or a woman of god, but not a robot of god a Protestant Church in germany has unveiled a robotic priest, called blessu 2, to mark 500 years since the reformation. The machine delivers various blessings in eight languages. Researchers at mit have come up with a unique way to let the visually impaired know more about whats around them. A 3d camera recognises stuff and feeds that detail back using vibrations through a belt and an electronic braille interface. Microsoft showed off a range of mixed reality headsets, theyre designed to blend the real world and virtual content into one where physical and digitally created objects co exist and interact. More on augmented reality in a tick. Google maps now doesntjust take you to your destination, it offers you a guided tour of it. Click on an art museum and take a peek around with each artwork displayed with the gallerys notations, plus extra links to find out more. Now, as youve just been hearing, microsoft may be leading the way in mixed or augmented reality, but theyre not the only company thats trying to make you see things that arent really there. Im at the augmented world expo, which has doubled in size since last year, a sign of the excitement this relatively new technology is generating. You can actually reach out. So i can grab that . Yes, and then pull it out. Pull it out. Oh, ive got it. There you go. Oh, wow now you have a hologram in front you. Now theres like a big brain. Yes, and when you open your fist. What do i do with the brain . When you open yourfist, you release it and then you can look at it. The brain is free. Yes. Now you can stick your hand inside it. 0h. Close your fist again. Now you move it around. Place it anywhere in space, anywhere you want. Anywhere i want. Yep. Im going to put it on top of codys head, behind the camera. There we go. Yeah. I feel like this is going to strain my eyes if i use it for any serious length of time, more than, say, 30 minutes. Funny that you say that, we have a team of neuroscientists on staff who actually do user testing with us. Were confirming with our Neuroscientists Team that it does not cause any eye strain or neck pain or anything when you get used to it. It takes you about a day. The problem with all of these devices is that most of them require expensive new gadgets, like these 799 glasses or big bulky devices that soon become uncomfortable to wear. But i did find one idea that i think could genuinely make many peoples lives easier. Project chalk is an app that uses augmented reality to let you remotely help someone use a gadget or fix an object. So next time your parents ring, you can show them what to do, not just tell them. Push this button right here. Ok, i can see itjust here. 0k. You can see the clever thing about this app is that, even if i move around the machine, we still have the instructions overlaid in the same place, which means it can be much more precise than if it was just drawn on a normal screen. Project chalks designed to work on all types of devices phones, tablets and what we call digital eyewear, which you can also think of those as ar glasses. So this will be available on a Freemium Basis which means anyone will be able to start by downloading it from the app store and using some level for free. But once people have to pay, do you think theyll go back to just using skype Orjust Talking on the phone to get these things solved . If they do, weve failed. That was dave lee. Now last week, the worlds best player in the chinese Board Game Go was pretty soundly beaten by googles Artificial Intelligence, alphago. For those following the Rapid Development of ai, the result wasnt exactly a surprise. 20 years ago, however, a victory of machine over man shocked the world, prompting apocalyptic warnings about our own role in society and questions about whether humanity could survive in a world where we could be outthought by computer. The man at the centre of that match was Chess Grandmaster garry kasparov. The machine was ibms supercomputer deep blue. You talk about the fact that it took you quite a long time to get over that defeat in that chess game. Thats true can you explain why it took that long and how you eventually did get over it . It was my first loss, and losing this match, that was a big shock. I mean, i knew i made mistakes, and i didnt play well, and i could kick myself in my head for not preparing well for the match. Since then, youve become an advocate of ai. At the end of the day, the futures a self fulfilling prophecy. So if were negative, something wrong will happen. Im not telling you that if were positive we can avoid it, but at least we have a chance to turn it into an adventure. Since its happening anyway, i could see whats happening in the game of chess, i have been looking for ways and means to make it our partner. I believe that theres so many things we can do, and when people say, we dont know whats going to happen next, fantastic, thats exactly the reason for us to move there because we dont know, that was one of the main driving forces in the history of humanity. The alphago software thats just won the match with go works in a very different way, which is teaching itself the rules. How do you feel about that kind of ai . Is that the way that a should go, learn about the rules of the world . One should say that deep blue was anything but intelligent. It was as intelligent as your alarm clock. Very expensive alarm clock, 10 million alarm clock, but still an alarm clock. Very powerful, brute force, with little chess knowledge, but chess proved to be vulnerable to this brute force it could be crunched. But with 200 million positions per second, thats roughly the average speed of deep blue, it showed very little intelligence. So it gave us almost no insight into the mysteries of Human Intelligence. Alphago is different because its a self teaching programme, and if were looking for al definition, its still hard to really understand whether alphago is al because now were moving probably from science to philosophy. So we still dont understand exactly what Human Intelligence is. What do you think are the grand challenges for Artificial Intelligence . What are the things that maybe arent being talked about enough or that people dont think about enough when it comes to accepting and implementing Artificial Intelligence . One thing thats important to remember that everything that we do and we know how to do, machines will do better eventually. Everything . Everything we do and we know how we do. But theres so many things that we dont know how we do. Lets concentrate on that, because machines have algorithms and theyre Getting Better and better, but machines have no curiosity, no passion and, most importantly, machines dont have purpose. Maybe the good thing is that so we know we have purpose, but we dont know exactly what the purpose is. So that guarantees that well stay around for quite a while. That was garry kasparov. Now, its time for Artificial Intelligence to be put to a slightly less noble task. For clicks show at this years hay festival, we challenged Click Code Monkey Stephen Beckett to create a game that the entire audience could play. Stephen has created this game. Were going to split the audience in two now, right down there. This half is going to play against this half. Could this half say hay . Hay could this half say wye . Wye superb. So this is the game. 0ur teams have to be the last one to fall off this plank, whether they do that by canny balancing or more Boisterous Butting is up to them. Theyre in two teams and by each moving their arms left and right, they can altogether control where their player goes. And theres one more surprise feature, by shouting out special keywords they can make their player get bigger and therefore heavier. So thats the rules of the game, but how can it see what youre doing and hear what youre saying . Behind the scenes, its running in a game engine called unity. You can download this for free, and its a great way to get started if you want to make games yourself. Theres a Massive Community out there offering free tutorials, tips and advice. Ive shared a few of my favourites over on twitter. Unity is looking after the graphics and rules of the game, and its also hooked into ibms artificially Intelligent Watson system, which is turning the speech from the audience into text that the computer can understand. Watson runs in the cloud, so my little laptop can have the smarts of a supercomputer just using a wi fi connection. If youve ever used a Speech Recognition Service like siri, alexa or google, youll know that sometimes they can be a bit hit and miss. Ibms watson is no exception, things like Background Noise and music can throw it off, leading to some unexpected suggestions. But to make the game more fun, ive set it up to also look for the most commonly misheard words. So words like say, stay and may will also count as a shout for hay. Despite this, i didnt anticipate just how loud our Click Audience could be. Shouting. Theyre so loud, in fact, that the Voice Recognition struggled to hear all the words, so there wasnt quite as much growing as id have liked. So thats the voice, but how do we work out where peoples arms are . Well, were using the openframeworks and 0pencv libraries. These are two beefy bits of software to help you build creative coding projects like this. 0penframeworks is more complicated than unity, but there are lots of great guides out there if you already have some programming experience. This programme takes the feed from our cameras, looks for edges and then tries to find lines by connecting the dots. So if you move your arm left or right, that counts as a vote for that direction. And that is all it takes to get 300 people in a tent in a field doing this. Give yourself a huge round of applause applause. Yeah, never a dull moment when you put us in a tent. Thats it from us for the hay festival for this year. Hopefully, we didnt break too much and theyll have us back again next year. In the meantime, why dont you follow us on facebook for loads of extra content and of course on twitter too bbcclick. Thanks for watching and, One More Time hay, wye hay, wye hello, some wet and windy weather on the way for some of us for the start of next week. We will get that in a moment. We are into a weekend of sunshine and showers, pleasant in the sun, cool underneath one of these building clouds, producing heavy downpours in places, especially for scotland and Northern Ireland as we look at the Satellite Picture from earlier. Some have developed in england and wales. If you are going out this evening, you may need an umbrella as you head out, when you come home most of the shower should have faded. Increasingly clear skies overnight, showers will continue into the northern isles, under the clear skies, temperatures dip, turning chilly away from larger towns and city centres. Some sports in the Highlands Grampians in scotland are close to freezing, the default patch developing. Tomorrow, blue skies starting the day, showers readily available across parts of South England and wales. Scotland, Northern Ireland and the north of england, many showers, some will cut across england and wales during the day. The picture at four oclock in the afternoon. Showers dotted about scotland, some heavy and thundery with the risk of hail. It will be cool in the showers. Breezy as well. Not everyone will see the showers. And improving picture in wales in the afternoon. This struck a showers for the south west of england, the midlands and up to the humber will gradually pushed down to parts of east anglia and england into the evening. Until then, mainly dry for most. Temperatures in the teens. That gradual movement of showers towards the South East On sunday evening tends to drizzle out, some rain moving into Northern Ireland overnight and into monday and the weather parts and then com pletely and the weather parts and then completely changes, two area is of low pressure from monday taking a band of rain through. More rain in the second developing area and put that the winds will pick up. Some wet weather, looks to last longer across parts of Northern England and wales. Wind strengthening, perhaps even wales. Wind strengthening, perhaps eve n severe wales. Wind strengthening, perhaps even severe gales and parts of the south. A lot of uncertainty about the system but as it continues on monday and tuesday, there could be disruption in places from either wind or rain, so pretty miserable weather for a wind or rain, so pretty miserable weatherfor a time, difficult travelling conditions, before that gradually clues eastwards on tuesday to leave quieter wednesday. But this will put them there could be some further disruption, will keep you updated. This is bbc news. The headlines at 11. 00 the Prime Minister has insisted that the conservative position on tax hasnt changed, thats after a senior Cabinet Minister appeared to go further than commitments outlined in the conservative manifesto. 0ur position on tax hasnt changed. As we have set out in the manifesto. What people will know when they go to vote on thursday, is it is the conservative party, always has been and always will be a low tax party. The labour Leaderjeremy Corbyn described conservative tax plans as in chaos today hes been campaigning in the east midlands, highlighting his plans for public services, and a fairer society. I think we cannot go on Underfunding Oui i think we cannot go on underfunding our public services,
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